Yet another stressed out student asking about silly LSI cards...

[jmatt3685]

Hi everyone,

I originally bought a TS440 (9UX) to use and ended up returning it as the version I bought said it supported 8 drives... failed to mention that it was another $200 in equipment or so, which was just about what I paid for the the rig itself!! Many thanks to marbus90 and the thread here for educating me: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...s-just-bought-a-new-system.23720/#post-199122

I have read the hardware guides and posts I can find and been through the ppt primer and feel pretty ok with things, overall. I've read through all 15 pages of the "confused about that lsi card" thread and am still fairly certain.... that I'm still confused. I've been building computers for more than a decade and love that, but this server thing is all new, and frankly, terrifying. I do want to build a custom, white-box one, someday. But right now, I'm just a second year medical student who is losing his mind over finals and upcoming boards, so spending the time to build one isn't something I'll have for another year or so. As such, I'm looking at buying one of the used supermicro 2u racks off ebay. Our school records all our lectures on video and audio, so I've got nearly 1.2tb there, in addition to my own collection of media (3.4tb). I've filled up my 2 pc's at home and thats why I'm looking at the freenas route.

The 2u I'm looking at comes with the Supermico L8i HBA card, which I know is set up for RAID. But they also have the drivers for flashing over to IT mode on the supermicro site (http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm). Now, here's my thing: I'm totally dense when it comes to anything with DOS or programming. Its something I want to get better at but right now I don't have all the time. So, I'm asking about how crazy is it to flash a card like this over? And I've read the downloaded user manual, but it seems a little... vague. I'm just trying to get an idea if this is something I can honestly do in less than an hour if I can expect to waste a day with it???

I know you guys see posts like this all the time, so I wanted to say thanks for reading and for any help you might lend.

Matt

 

[cyberjock]

Well, if time is short (which it sounds like it is) I would either find a friend to do this stuff, pay someone to do it, or avoid FreeNAS until you can make time.

Time really is the teacher here, and the last thing you want to do is learn that you screwed something up when all your data disappears. That is the short and dirty. :(

As for flashing the card, I've never tried to flash that card. I'm fairly confident it won't do >2TB drives. It is also a MegaRAID card, so I don't think IT firmware exists for that card. If you have a link I'd be happy to read it though.

So I think your answers are...

-Definitely spend the time to figure this stuff out, or you'll spend the time trying to get all your lost files back (and I'm not talking data recovery from the lost zpool)
-Your hardware isn't really recommended.

 

[jmatt3685]

Well, I guess you're right, better to just wait on it than lose it when I need it.

As an aside, is there any good for those used supermicro builds? There's tons of them on ebay.... I agree that maybe they're not the best for 5+ years of use, but I wonder if they might be enough to get by until I can build my own?

 

[cyberjock]

Depends on what you define as "used supermicro builds". There are used x8, x9 and x10 builds. Those can work well (especially the x9 and x10s) but you don't necessarily get to buy them for really cheap like the x7 stuff.

 

[jmatt3685]

Yeah, I'm looking at a few of them with X8 boards. Ideally, I'd want to just get something that's relatively inexpensive that I can put freenas on and use for about a year or so. Then, probably around christmas or so, when I've got the time to invest, I can build my own and just bring the zpool over to the new hardware. I'm thinking about getting a used server for around $150-200 and figure that should work for a little while?

 

[Darren Myers]

My FreeNAS build runs on the X8 supermicro boards, and then i have a SAN that runs on one as well. Both use the supermicro cases ones a 4U and the other is a 2U. All spec's are in my signature, the 4U case wasnt cheap....the 2U was, but it only takes 2.5 inch drives.

EDIT: this might be a good starter in your price range. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...895?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43db94a1d7

 

[jmatt3685]

Nice find! I was also looking at ones like this. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...303?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c52626897

I've currently got 6x5tb Reds that I'm waiting to throw into the rack, and that should last me for quite a while. The other perk is that most of the supermicro boards have 6 sata ports, so an extra controller isn't a necessity. One question that I had that my google-fu couldn't answer, either on the web or the forums, was some advice one dual or single cpu's? Many of the boards come with dual cpu's that have pretty decent performance scores. But... it's an NAS, will that really matter? Ideally, I'd love to use it at home for plex (and most of my collection is blu-ray rips), but there would only be one transcode running at a time. From what I've read, the multi-core cpu's are nice as each core can handle its own transcode and access its own bank of ram. But it's just my girlfriend and I, so it's not like I've got a family of 5 or a small office, it's really just me. Is there any real consensus on the dual vs single cpu thing???

 

[Darren Myers]

I will tell you those 1-4U are somewhat loud, and the single or dual CPUs can be power hungry. I use my dual quad cores just because I rather have them and not need em, then need em and not have em;I have a ESXi VM that handles plex rather then the plex jail/plugin via FreeNAS. I use my FreeNAS just for CIFS and doing some VM backups too.

 

[jmatt3685]

Yeah, I was afraid of the noise... so I'm actually considering putting it in the closet in the office or even downstairs. As to the VM stuff... is there any good guide to explaining all that? So far, I've got sonarr (and all that goes with it) installed as plugins and am also looking at putting the crashplan on next weekend after finals. I keep reading all this stuff about people running vm's and I honestly don't know the first thing about it... like why would even use a virtual machine???

 

[Darren Myers]

Well you can run VMs inside FreeNAS, but i dont personally....VM's are nice if you want to run say a windows 7 box inside a VM for remote desktop use, or a VM for torrenting rather then use a plugin. I run a virtual environment because i kind of break things....either on purpose on by accident. Granted the hardware requirements for some VM use is a little crazy (dual quad cores, 48Gb ram or more, etc) i have a VM for DHCP, RDP, Plex, Apps (wireless virtual controller, quickbooks server), vCenter , Sickrage, OpenVPN , Veeam and some dev stuff i use to tinker with, a few ubuntu versions and some windows servers i keep around incase i need to troubleshoot something. I also like the virtual environment because i can take backups of every VM and put it in a centralized place, and if i screw one up i can restore that VM to its previous state before i broke it, almost like a normal back/restore but because they're VM's its a little easier. And with a VM, if one of my hosts dies completely or fries, i can build a new box, install the virtualization OS, and then tell it where to find the VM's and they will important and start running again

 

[marbus90]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/151679352918
doesn't have IPMI, the Adaptec 5805 card needs to be replaced with an LSI 9211-8i, but if you ask the seller he should be able to configure your server according to that. maybe they can flash the P16 IT mode firmware for you as well. It's a proper, entry-level server with enough space to add another 6 HDDs (as long as you add at least another 8GB RAM) and isn't a amp-guzzler/space heater like the X7 generation servers. once you got FreeNAS up and running you don't really need IPMI anyway.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/141663641415
has far beefier CPUs in there which also support AES-NI for encryption and should be able to handle 6 plex transcoding streams simultaneously (compared to the 2 of the E5504 system). RAM: the more the merrier, 24GB is a good start. Altough you'll need to add the price of an 9211-8i on top here, seller should be able to wire 8 bays to the LSI and 4 bays to the onboard Intel SATA.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/131506270573
is a 24bay variant of the above mentioned. per 8 HDDs you'll need 1x LSI 9211-8i. Same seller, so same procedures - just request those HBA(s) be added and flashed. This one is capable of 4 transcoding streams simultaneously.

24GB RAM should keep you for at least 30-40TiB worth of storage. after that I'd jump to 48GB and not worry about anything.

 

[jtonthebike]

just a thought .. you can squeeze 3x 140mm fans and change out the 80mm fans for something quieter + change the psu to something ATX and et voila, you have a *MUCH* quieter machine with excellent air-flow. Sadly, I don't have a thermal imaging camera to display the results, but given i'm mid-build with mine, I'm delighted with how quiet it is.

Have you seen the HP Microserver? I have one, I understand they run freenas without issue too. So perhaps a few of those may be a wise alternative? OK, their 4x disks but you can stick some 2.5" in the 5.25" bay and bump up your storage capacity that way. And they're well priced (here in the UK anyway...)

 

[marbus90]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...l-n54l-with-amd-freenas-10.30879/#post-200678