Used supermicro / LGA 2011 ATX build (8-12 drives)

[philipforget]

After 6 years I've officially outgrown my 6x3tb Node 304 FreeNAS box. I'll be using that one as a backup target for a new FreeNAS server I'm building now but I have a few questions about my hardware choices below.

Here's the plan, largely following the recommendations of @Chris Moore on Specific build changes to upgrade as high as 512GB of RAM

The whole thing is going to live behind my couch where my current freenas machine and HTPC sit so it needs to be pretty quiet. I live in an apartment so used rack mount stuff is not really an option.

Primary use: Dedicated storage server with a few NFS shares and potential iSCSI targets for VMS on a different machine in the future. No jails, no vms, nothing but freenas. I want to optimize for that use case and potential expandability.

- Case: Fractal Design R6, fits up to 12 drives.
- Drives: 8x10tb WD
- Motherboard: Supermicro X9SRL-F
- Ram: Minimum 32gb DDR3 ecc to start
- CPU: Something like an E5-2650L, hoping to find a mobo + cpu + ram + cooler combo in the ~250-300 range on eBay that fits these specs ( similar to this option or this one with an E5-1620).
- Cooler: Hopefully as part of a combo described above or possibly a Noctua NH-U9DX to keep things quiet
- PSU: Seasonic FOCUS Plus 850 Gold, might it make sense to go with 1000w upfront to support a potential 12 drives in the future?
- 10gbe NIC: Chelsio T420-CR dual 10gbe
- SAS HBA: Dell H310 IT Mode, I figured the first 8 drives on the SAS HBA, any additional drives in the future can go to the mobo's sata ports
- 64gb SSD boot drive
- Variety of cables (mini SAS to sata, etc)

For ZFS configuration, I'd like to keep in mind potentially expanding with 4 more drives in a few years, does 2x4 Raidz2 pools make the most sense starting with 8 drives and then adding 4 more as it's own raidz2 pool in the future?

Thanks for all the hard work and recommendations so far!

 

[lightwave]

For ZFS configuration, I'd like to keep in mind potentially expanding with 4 more drives in a few years, does 2x4 Raidz2 pools make the most sense starting with 8 drives and then adding 4 more as it's own raidz2 pool in the future?

The pool configuration looks somewhat inefficient to me. By setting up 4-disk raidz2 you loose 50 % of the capacity to parity giving you a total of 40 TB storage from your 8x10 TB disks. I would probably have aimed for a 6-disk raidz2 with an option to add a second 6-disk raidz2 later on. This would still give you 40 TB initially, but with fewer disks. It would also “upgrade” to 80 TB rather than 60 TB when you have 12 disks up and running (or more if you go for larger disks). This setup seems to be the preferred configuration for raidz2 by many here at the forum: fewer disks and you loose a lot to parity; more disks and performance starts to suffer + the likelihood of a three disk failure starts to build up.

If you are set on starting with 8 disks, you could set up an initial 8-disk raidz2 (or raidz3) for a total of 60 TB (or 50 TB) of storage and add two 2-disk mirrors for good performance on iSCSI later on (depending on your needs).

 

[philipforget]

@lightwave good point on the drive utilization, I might just start off with 6 drives in Raidz2 and hold off on getting 4 more in the future when prices dip down again.


What's more important when looking at CPU for FreeNAS only (no jails etc), single core speeds or more physical cores?