BUILD This Supermicro build just kind of fell into my lap, how does this sound as a setup?

[Craysh]

I got a 12 tray 2U rack server with a Supermicro X7DBR-E board with two quad CPUs and 32GB of RAM for $50.

These are the specifics:

CPU: (2) Intel Xeon E5450 Quad Core
Memory: (8x 4GB) DDR2 PC2-5300F 667MHz CL5 ECC Fully Buffered FB-DIMM (240 PIN)
Hard Drives: (10)HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 3TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache
Extras: IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode

I intend to run two vdev in RAIDZ2 with 5 drives in each. Since FreeNAS suggests at least 1GB per TB I have a spare 2GB to play with (and hopefully plenty of CPU cycles).

My primary usage and only concern in regards to horsepower will be streaming Plex locally and online over Google Fiber so transcoding will be a factor.

Any comments and suggestions?

 

[marbus90]

Isn't a good choice due to the massive heat output of DDR2 FBDIMMs and the older CPUs.

Plex can be an issue on that kind of hardware as well.

 

[Craysh]

Well that's definitely disappointing.

I have a beefy workstation I guess I could use instead for that using a CIFS share.

Any idea if running stuff like NZBGET would have the same issue since they aren't really that resource intensive or is the whole build just bad in general? The internal fans move a huge amount of air.

 

[jgreco]

Well that's definitely disappointing.

I have a beefy workstation I guess I could use instead for that using a CIFS share.

Any idea if running stuff like NZBGET would have the same issue since they aren't really that resource intensive or is the whole build just bad in general? The internal fans move a huge amount of air.

Try it anyways. For $50, you got a hell of a deal. You can always yank the mainboard/CPU/RAM and put in something modern, and you've still gotten a great deal.

 

[BigDave]

Heck, the HBA card is worth $50!!!

 

[Craysh]

I'll give it a go once I get the drives.

Is the two vdev idea suggested or would 1 be good? I'd have one vdev if possible.

 

[marbus90]

single big 10disk raidz2 is acceptable.

 

[Craysh]

That would still give me 2 party drives right? It doesn't double up the parity drive number to 4?

 

[marbus90]

a single vdev has raidzN parity drives. N is in that case 2. so the vdev has 2 parity drives.

it doesn't matter if you group 4 or 10 disks per raidz2 vdev, it will always have two parity drives.

 

[jgreco]

That would still give me 2 party drives right? It doesn't double up the parity drive number to 4?

And just to clarify what marbus90 just said, if you went with two vdevs, then yes, that'd be four drives worth of space lost to parity, two per vdev.