Would this be good Supermicro stuff?

[DVitoD]

G'day :)

I want to replace my Synology 8-bay NAS so I have more space for harddisks (it's full now). This NAS uses 130W.

I've met a very nice man it seems who is willing to sell me:
1. This super chassis: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/933/SC933T-R760.cfm
2. A used motherboard to go with it: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon1333/5000P/X7DBE.cfm (for which I found some comments here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182094).
3. 2x 4GB RAM (I know I probably need more)

(EDIT: the mobo is not 'certified' for the super chassis according to the SM-website, but the nice man assures me it will fit regardlessly).

(EDIT2: included are also 3(!) 760W power supplies).

3. Out of CPU's, a choice of:
A. XEON E5150: http://ark.intel.com/products/27218/Intel-Xeon-Processor-5150-4M-Cache-2_66-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB
B. XEON L5420: http://ark.intel.com/products/33929/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L5420-12M-Cache-2_50-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB
C. XEON X5460: http://ark.intel.com/products/33087/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5460-12M-Cache-3_16-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB

(I'm not sure which CPU I would need, and only 1 or better 2 CPU's, and I would like to have something at least a little power efficient)

He says everything is complete, all I need to buy separately (because he doesn't have them) are:
A. An 'hba controller', so I can put more than 6 HDD's in the machine (which is the purpose :D)
B. CPU heat sink.

My questions:
1. Would you all agree this is decent hardware?
2. Which CPU to take? (And 1, or better 2?)
3. My Synology does 130W with these 8 disks (and Intel Atom, and dual NIC inside); is this mobo/CPU to be expected to use much much much more?
4. My searching for SuperMicro was based on CyberJock's hardware guide. However, in another thread in this forum (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/supermicro-support.25587/) even CyberJock himself confirmed it is 'rather cheap' hardware. Which leads to my question: isn't Dell or anything like those A-brands better? If so, any recommendations perhaps to help me on my search there?

Thank you in advance for any answers very much :D

 

[jgreco]

Generally speaking the older generation Xeons take more power than the new generation Xeons, and a dual CPU board tends to soak up more power than a single CPU board, even with just a single CPU. With two CPU's you'll find that it is using lots of power. Also, they're quite a bit slower than contemporary CPU's.

The best of those, the X5460, hits around 1600 Geekbench for a single core.

A contemporary E3-1230 v3 does around 3000-3200, or nearly double.

It also uses substantially less power. The thing going on here is that this unit you're being offered was probably a high quality high end server five to eight years ago, and in the meantime it has become uneconomical to run any longer because it burns lots of watts but is relatively slow compared to current offerings. When it was new, the watt burn was not "out of line" because everything at the high end burns lots of watts, but what you'd be better off doing is seeing if you can snag an appropriate chassis off eBay and then put some current X10 hardware in it.

 

[marbus90]

This Mobo is basically ancient stone-age tech. FB-DIMMs and FSB are quite a bad choice for a FreeNAS, energy- and performance-wise. You should look for at least Supermicro X8 components. Also that chassis runs very old PSUs which itself are very inefficient.

What would your use-case be, how much usable storage is needed, how much redundancy?

 

[jgreco]

The inefficiency of the power supplies pales next to the overall energy consumption of the board. They're probably not 760W power supplies but rather three modules making up a 760W overall supply, probably 3 380W modules (two needed to "make chassis run"). Typically those will be at least 75% efficient, probably more like 80% under load. I'd guess the base system would be eating 125-225 watts with a single CPU, then add on 8-12W per hard drive, so with 15 bays that'd be 120-180W, so I'd expect that the system might chew between 245-405W.

That backplane is proooooobably a SATA/SAS 3Gbps affair, so that's not terrible but 6Gbps is modern and 12Gbps is the new hotness. It is possible that the backplane might have some issues if you try to run 6Gbps through it, like an M1015 with modern drives.

 

[jgreco]

Oh, and, sorry to be the bearer of crappy news.

 

[DVitoD]

I would like to thank the two of you very, very, very very much (4x very for 4 replies :D).

You have just saved me from obviously making a serious mistake: thank you(!)

I will go with plan-B, which is: I will buy an Intel NIC for one of my HTPC's (I know from pfSense FreeBSD likes Intel since Intel co-develops the drivers for it), and install FreeNAS on that with a couple of WD HDD's I have as spares. That way, I can take more time to assess FreeNAS. I should have done that in the first place, but I thought this offer from this kind man was 'one time only'.

I Installed FreeNAS in VirtualBox yesterday, btw, just following the manual, and that went 100% smoothly. Even in the virtualbox, with 4GB of RAM and 1 virtual disk of 4GB, it was very pleasantly fast :)

I need to devote more time to assessing the functionality, I realized reading some other threads this morning; in one there was a remark about IP-cams. I still want to have these, and of course you need an IP-cam program for recording, storing, viewing, etc. In that thread it was mentioned FreeNAS can't do it, and then it was said ZFSguru could be made to work since, and I am only telling what I've read, I don't know if it is true, ZFS-guru is 'full blown FreeBSD, whereas FreeNAS is 'crippled' (again: not my words ) FreeBSD. So in ZFSguru one could, as a work around, install a virtual machine in which one could install Windows in which one could install an IP-cam management program. In FreeNAS this, according to the people in that thread, this would not be possible (I do know however you can install Virtualbox in PC-BSD, which is also developed by ixSystems).

So, in the end, I will go plan-B.

Could I ask one more question?

Will it work with AMD A10-5700 FM2? Because this is the CPU that is in the HTPC. I recall I've read on this forum somewhere that AMD gives problems (?), but I can't find that thread anymore :(

Again, thank you very much for preventing me doing something stupid: thank you:D

 

[jgreco]

Well, it wasn't stupid, but it was fraught with all sorts of hidden gotchas. It's a cheap route to go because... well because nobody wants that crap anymore.

FreeNAS is designed to be an appliance, not a full blown FreeBSD system. You can get a lot of the functionality of a full FreeBSD box using jails, especially for stuff that's over-the-net, but it can be a bit more work than you'd want. As far as I know FreeNAS also supports VirtualBox. However, I don't have any major experience with that.

As for the AMD stuff, there are some issues, primarily that while AMD often supports ECC memory, it makes it very difficult to validate whether or not it is working correctly. ZFS is designed for systems with ECC, because ZFS lacks tools to fix a corrupted pool. The strategy is to prevent undetectable corruption from being present in the pool, so if your pool's data is important/irreplaceable/etc you really need a known-good ECC implementation. There's a long ECC firefight thread in the hardware forum, probably stickied, if you want the gories.

Known-good ECC implementations basically only come on server grade boards, where the manufacturer specializes in that sort of thing. Most HP, IBM, Dell servers qualify but usually come in expensive non-FreeNAS-friendly configs. We like Supermicro around here because they offer a plethora of options and you can "build to suit." Lower power options like the Avoton are also available and pretty attractive.

 

[Jailer]

If you plan on virtualization as part of your project make sure you do some research on what windows version you plan on running. So far I've only been able to get XP x64 to run without generating errors or stability issues.