Will my next HW upgrade be able to cope?

[Willd Will]

Hello All,

Long time user, first time poster here :)

I am currently in the process of upgrading my home FreeNas setup and I was wondering what you thoughts where on my new direction.

Currently I have a simple Mini ITX board with an i5 CPU and 16 gig of memory, for disks I have 6 2TB 5400rpm drives in raid6 (ZFS2). I also running few jails on it, the main is Plex for media streaming.

I am looking at moving to the following board that will allow me to use ECC memory, of which i will probably go with 32GB to start with, so i can do dedupe ETC. The main difference is its a on board 8 core Atom processor, which i know will be more then enough for freeNAS but what about running jails under/ inside freenas?

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRi-2758F.cfm

So what do you lot reckon?

Ww

 

[anodos]

Hello All,

Long time user, first time poster here :)

I am currently in the process of upgrading my home FreeNas setup and I was wondering what you thoughts where on my new direction.

Currently I have a simple Mini ITX board with an i5 CPU and 16 gig of memory, for disks I have 6 2TB 5400rpm drives in raid6 (ZFS2). I also running few jails on it, the main is Plex for media streaming.

I am looking at moving to the following board that will allow me to use ECC memory, of which i will probably go with 32GB to start with, so i can do dedupe ETC. The main difference is its a on board 8 core Atom processor, which i know will be more then enough for freeNAS but what about running jails under/ inside freenas?

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRi-2758F.cfm

So what do you lot reckon?

Ww

If you're running out of storage space, adding more storage is typically a better solution than deduplication. Storage is cheap, but performance penalties for deduplication are not. See the following excerpt from the wiki:

"Deduplication: the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data in order to save space. Once deduplicaton occurs, it can improve ZFS performance as less data is written and stored. However, the process of deduplicating the data is RAM intensive and a general rule of thumb is 5 GB RAM per TB of storage to be deduplicated. In most cases, enabling compression will provide comparable performance. Beginning with FreeNAS® 8.3.0, deduplication can be enabled at the dataset level and there is no way to undedup data once it is deduplicated: switching deduplication off has NO AFFECT on existing data. The more data you write to a deduplicated dataset, the more RAM it requires, and there is no upper bound on this. When the system starts storing the DDTs (dedup tables) on disk because they no longer fit into RAM, performance craters. Furthermore, importing an unclean pool can require between 3-5 GB of RAM per TB of deduped data, and if the system doesn't have the needed RAM it will panic, with the only solution being to add more RAM or to recreate the pool. Think carefully before enabling dedup!"

 

[cyberjock]

What anodos said. If you plan to have to do 6x2TB drives in a RAIDZ2 I wouldn't even consider it without at least 64GB of RAM and I'd seriously recommend 96GB of RAM.

Dedup is one of those things that is not cost effective for 99.99% of situations because the money you'll save on disk space is marginal compared to the cost of the RAM.