Which of the boards is the right one for FreeNAS

[Nxt97]

At the moment im searching for the right board.
First I just want to use my FreeNAS system only for Media Storage, Backups of my "important data". VM's / Dockers I run of my Main Server with 3x 500GB SSD's in raid 5 (HWR).

I was looking at this boards:

• X11SDV-4C-TLN2F
• X10SDV-4C+-TLN4F
• A2SDi-H-TF

For both of the X10/X11 board I have a IBM M1015 Raid Controller in IT-Mode at home, cause I would like to use a 12Bay case for the build.

All the time I was looking at the X10SDV board cause it has low power consumption and got the 10Gbe NIC's, now im not sure it got the power for the 10Gbe transfers over SMB (read about that SAMBA only uses one core per connection?) The X10 got an Intel® Xeon® processor D-1518, 2.2GHz; CPU TDP support 35W.

But now I was looking at the X11 that got an Intel® Xeon® Processor D-2123IT with 3GHz but 60W TDP, higher power consumption but also higher clock speed. -- update: actually I was wrong also just got the 2.2GHz. So I think this makes no sense anymore :D

The A2SDi also looks good for me cause it already got 4 Sata Ports and 2 Mini SAS port for a total of 12 drives.. And an Internal USB port, that's nice to have ..

I hope someone of you guys, already experienced something or heard something about this boards and can help me to decide what should be the right pick..

Thaaanks :)

 

[Breit]

These Supermicro Xeon-D Boards are very nice as a base for FreeNAS.
I chose a Supermicro X10SDV-2C-7TP4F back when I assembled my box, mainly because it has a low TDP CPU (Pentium D-1508, 25W TDP, 2 cores, HT, turbo), has Dual-10GigE and also has a 16-port SAS-2 controller. This board is equipped with 64GB ECC RAM and an additional IBM ServeRAID M1215 SAS-3 8-port controller in IT-mode and a total of 24 disks.
At the time of this build, the Xeon-D 2xxx series wasn't out yet and I needed a Flex-ATX board and the onboard SAS ports.
The Pentium D-1508 has turbo and can go up to 2.6GHz where the Pentium D-1518 has no turbo and only 2.3GHz (but double the L2-cache). All the higher end Flex-ATX boards with Xeon-D CPUs have more cores and turbo, but only up to 2.3GHz (and cost a lot more). So I figured this X10SDV-2C-7TP4F is the sweet spot for my NAS needs. It also has an mSATA port, which is great for a small SSD to host the FreeNAS installation and a m.2 PCIe-x4 port if one need a cache SSD.

I first benched its network performance under Windows Server 2016 with a Samsung 950PRO NVMe SSD and got 1.5GB/s transfer speed over both 10GigE ports (teamed). So the platform should not holding me back here.
Under FreeNAS, my main pool consists of 12 8TB WD-RED drives (5400rpm) arranged in 2x RaidZ2 at 6 disks each and I've got transfer speeds between 250 MB/s and 500 MB/s to and from the pool over the network, but I guess this is mainly limited by the disks and ZFS itself.

With iPerf I've got ~3.5 Gbits/s (pure network, no disks involved) out of the box and after heavy tweaking with tunables I managed to get it up to 9 Gbits/s to/from a Windows 10 Box with a single 10GigE connection. Not perfect, but sufficient for the performance the disks can provide.

To sum it up, for the most part this platform should be sufficient if not too many users are accessing the NAS simultaneously. That would require more cores on the CPU. Also if you plan on running various plugins or VM's, I also would suggest getting a CPU with more cores.

Now that the Xeon-D 2xxx CPUs are out, I would suggest getting a board with one of these. They have better single-thread performance due to a higher clock speed (up to 3GHz) and more L2-cache. For instance the X11SDV-4C-TLN2F or the X11SDV-4C-TP8F are looking promising. They have the same CPU and are similiar priced, but the latter has 2 PCIe expansion slots, an onboard 8-port SAS controller and quad-10GigE LAN (2x 10GBase-T and 2x SFP+). The TDP is 60W for these but in the end this doesn't matter much, since the disks are responsible for the better part of the power consumption anyways.

I hope this helps. Happy new year!

 

[kdragon75]

The X10 got an Intel

Does the x10 still have an Intel or did it lose it?
"The X10 has an Intel"

 

[kdragon75]

I first benched its network performance under Windows Server 2016 with a Samsung 950PRO NVMe SSD and got 1.5GB/s transfer speed over both 10GigE ports (teamed). So the platform should not holding me back here.

That's not how you benchmark network performance. That's how you benchmark the combine limitations of that exact setup.

 

[Breit]

That's not how you benchmark network performance. That's how you benchmark the combine limitations of that exact setup.

You are right. The benchmark of the network performance under FreeNAS was later done with iPerf for instance. All I wanted to know at this point was, if the system is capable to deliver enough performance for sequential data transfers on a SMB share over the network. I only mentioned this because there were doubts about the CPU and that it might be too weak. I'd like to see a positive first before I investigate further. This at least gives me confidence that if a certain level of desired performance isn't reached, it must have other reasons. If this doesn't help you, then feel free to ignore it. ;)