I'll be purchasing all hardware for my first FreeNAS build soon. This will be for a small business, and I'll be running just a few VMs in the jail. Below is the list of hardware that I've selected. I'll be using RAID-Z2. Any critique would be wonderful. All my hardware purchases will be through Newegg or Amazon:
CPU: Intel E3-1271 v3 - 3.6ghz quad core /w hyperthreading
motherboard: ASRock E3C224D4I-14S - socket 1150
memory: 4x 8gb ECC ddr3 1600mhz samsung M391B1G73QH0-YK0
disks: 6x 6TB Western Digital Red Pro WD6001FFWX
SSD: (old) Intel 80gb
case: Lian Li PC-Q26A
PSU: Seasonic 660w Platinum - SS-660XP2
Questions:
1) If I go with raid Z2, then I'd get 24TB of usable space. With 6 disks (4 usable), will I be able to add another 4 identical disks later to double my capacity to 48TB? I'm not sure if adding additional equal-sized disks to the same pool is possible. Are there alternatives, or would I have to get all disks from the start?
2) I'm assuming 32gb of ECC memory is sufficient to cache 24tb of disk, but is not enough for 48TB of disks?
3) How much of the CPU does the system actually use? I'm assuming the CPU is way overkill. I'll be running just a few light VMs as well. What has the most impact on CPU usage in a FreeNAS box?
4) What kind of throughput can I expect for transfer across the network? I have all gigabit switches right now. My current Synology NAS is only getting ~110mb/s because I'm assuming the disk's read/write rate is the bottleneck.
CPU: Intel E3-1271 v3 - 3.6ghz quad core /w hyperthreading
motherboard: ASRock E3C224D4I-14S - socket 1150
memory: 4x 8gb ECC ddr3 1600mhz samsung M391B1G73QH0-YK0
disks: 6x 6TB Western Digital Red Pro WD6001FFWX
SSD: (old) Intel 80gb
case: Lian Li PC-Q26A
PSU: Seasonic 660w Platinum - SS-660XP2
Questions:
1) If I go with raid Z2, then I'd get 24TB of usable space. With 6 disks (4 usable), will I be able to add another 4 identical disks later to double my capacity to 48TB? I'm not sure if adding additional equal-sized disks to the same pool is possible. Are there alternatives, or would I have to get all disks from the start?
2) I'm assuming 32gb of ECC memory is sufficient to cache 24tb of disk, but is not enough for 48TB of disks?
3) How much of the CPU does the system actually use? I'm assuming the CPU is way overkill. I'll be running just a few light VMs as well. What has the most impact on CPU usage in a FreeNAS box?
4) What kind of throughput can I expect for transfer across the network? I have all gigabit switches right now. My current Synology NAS is only getting ~110mb/s because I'm assuming the disk's read/write rate is the bottleneck.
Last edited: