BUILD Upgrade recommendation

[rumdr19]

I am looking to spend a little bit of money on a upgrade. Should I invest in a new CPU or more memory ?I will eventually upgrade the MB to a ECC compatible one. However, it won't be for a while. I am normally only getting about 50 MB/S, much lower in some cases. Sometimes streaming 1080p movies via Plex get really choppy. So I end up lowering the resolution to accommodate. I would like to watch the movies at their highest resolution. Where would my money be best spent?

Here is my current setup:

FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201501162230
MSI Z97 PC Mate
Intel G3258 3.2 GHz LGA 1150
16GB (4x4GB) Patriot PV38G160C9K
Dell Intel X3959 Pro/1000 Dual Port Server NIC C57721-005
5x 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11
2x 2TB WD Black
1x ZPool (2x RAIDZ-1 + 1x Stripe)

 

[joeschmuck]

16GB of RAM is more than fine for a home system, especially for streaming.

Not sure why your throughput is only 50MB/s but if you have Plex doing transcoding then I'd say grab a faster CPU. If you want to not spend any more money then just convert your video files into a supported format for your player so transcoding isn't needed.

You have many drives listed but only kind of listing a RAIDZ1 so I'm a bit confused on your drive configuration.

 

[rumdr19]

16GB of RAM is more than fine for a home system, especially for streaming.

Not sure why your throughput is only 50MB/s but if you have Plex doing transcoding then I'd say grab a faster CPU. If you want to not spend any more money then just convert your video files into a supported format for your player so transcoding isn't needed.

You have many drives listed but only kind of listing a RAIDZ1 so I'm a bit confused on your drive configuration.

I have two 1 volume with two RAIDZ1 and one striped. i messed up with the stripe. i was running out of space and added a single drive. I know this is a risky setup. I am waiting on some new WD Reds to replace my pool.
Here is what my drive config looks like:

 

[marbus90]

I didn't understand your HDD setup. If you have a stripe in your single pool, you don't need raidz either on the other disks. I'd recommend to reconfigure it to a 6disk raidz2 and mix the capacities. As soon as you upgrade all HDDs in that pool, the pool will grow automatically. For the moment you'll be stuck at 5.4TiB then. You'll lose your data anyway if you lose that single disk attached to your zpool, so do yourself the favour and destroy the pool now. At least you can backup the important data now.

As per hardware recommendations, read the stickies. ASRock C2750D4I or any Supermicro with that C2750 CPU or Supermicro X10SLL-F/SLL+-F/SLM-F/SLM+-F. With the latter you could at least keep your CPU troughout the upgrade-path - but those boards don't like non-ECC RAM. So be prepared to drop money on at least one 8GB ECC DIMM, preferably from the Memory Compability List.

 

[rumdr19]

I didn't understand your HDD setup. If you have a stripe in your single pool, you don't need raidz either on the other disks. I'd recommend to reconfigure it to a 6disk raidz2 and mix the capacities. As soon as you upgrade all HDDs in that pool, the pool will grow automatically. For the moment you'll be stuck at 5.4TiB then. You'll lose your data anyway if you lose that single disk attached to your zpool, so do yourself the favour and destroy the pool now. At least you can backup the important data now.

As per hardware recommendations, read the stickies. ASRock C2750D4I or any Supermicro with that C2750 CPU or Supermicro X10SLL-F/SLL+-F/SLM-F/SLM+-F. With the latter you could at least keep your CPU troughout the upgrade-path - but those boards don't like non-ECC RAM. So be prepared to drop money on at least one 8GB ECC DIMM, preferably from the Memory Compability List.

Yeah, I want to get rid of that striped drive. I was being stupid when i striped it. I posted the question on how to remove it from the pool HERE. But I guess there is no easy way other than destroying the pool and redoing it....

 

[marbus90]

Yep. Or you could wait some years until removing vdevs from a pool went downstream from OpenZFS. However, by that time the drives are dead anyway...

 

[joeschmuck]

I agree with the above posting, if you can backup all your data and create a RAIDZ2 with six drives then you would be siting better.