10+ Bay Server Build

[suppaduppax]

Chris, looking at other potential r510s on the market I see that the cheaper ones come with Xeon E56xx cpus and compared with the Opteron 4284 seem to be on par with power efficiency and processing power. Is there something I’m missing?

 

[Chris Moore]

A Dell T3600 could be a great FreeNAS server because it is, if I recall correctly, able to use registered DDR3 memory. The trouble with it is, your just in need of drive bays.
If you can deal with not being hot-swap, then you might have more options.

 

[suppaduppax]

Yea I don’t need hotswap. I don’t imagine needing to change drives out that often to justify it.

T3600 can use ddr3 yea

 

[Chris Moore]

I will need to get home so I can do some research and post back later, bUT I think we can come up with a different solution.

 

[suppaduppax]

Thanks for all the help. Right now I’ve maxed the drives in it. It takes 2 drives by default but I took apart the flex bay with the card reader and put a drive in there and have another one floating inside. Had to add a couple sata power splitters to get the job done. It gets quite hot in there too. The other issue is it only has 8gb ECC ram.

Anyway the help is appreciated!

 

[suppaduppax]

I might actually bite on this unless Chris can work his magic... I think they'll sell it for $150 and then I think I can sell my T3600 for $400... that'll leave room to buy some caddies.

 

[Chris Moore]

Anyting I come up with is going to cost more than $150 so it depends on your budget

 

[suppaduppax]

i see... it's good to hear anyway.. i haven't pulled the trigger and i've got time.

 

[rvassar]

Chris, looking at other potential r510s on the market I see that the cheaper ones come with Xeon E56xx cpus and compared with the Opteron 4284 seem to be on par with power efficiency and processing power. Is there something I’m missing?

Here you need to take a look at the actual benchmarks. Hop over to: https://www.cpubenchmark.net

Start comparing CPU combinations. For example, I punched in the Opteron 4284 and the Core i3-2120 I'm currently running. The Opteron draws 95 watts vs my i3's 65 watts. The Opteron has an overall Passmark score of 6,660, where my i3 only rates a Passmark score of 3,927. The Opteron appears to be 40% faster at first glance. However... The Opteron is a 4 core 2 thread per core chip, it's single thread rating is only 1,116. My i3-2120 has two cores, and two threads per core, but the single thread rating is 1,692. So for single thread tasks the i3 is 35% faster than the Opteron, and uses 30% less energy. So the question then becomes, what are single thread tasks? I'll hazard a guess, compression is probably the biggest single thread CPU use in FreeNAS. The FreeBSD kernel used to have a giant MUTEX wrapped around it, so only one CPU could be in kernel space at a time. That's long been resolved, but the position of the gates and locks can still serialize events to near single thread speeds.

There's an old quote often attributed to Seymour Cray, but I believe was actually a quote from one of the Pyramid Systems CEO's... "What do you want pulling your plow? Two oxen, or 16 chickens?"

This is why I'm running a $50 used Motherboard, and a $20 CPU, and a cheap case that holds the drives I need. ;)

 

[suppaduppax]

I did compare the xeon e56xx with the Opteron 4284 and they seem pretty on par benchmark wise. It looks like I can get the Opteron 4386 from the same guy as well which may be a better processor.

For the amount of drives I’m looking to use, I’m still open to alternatives but compared to the R510, the R515 doesn’t seem too much different and I was willing to jump on the R510.

I’m going to have to sell my T3600 tho to pay the R515 or anything else. That’s why my budget was $500 cuz I could get close to that selling my T3600.

 

[Chris Moore]

I’m going to have to sell my T3600 tho to pay the R515 or anything else. That’s why my budget was $500 cuz I could get close to that selling my T3600.

I was thinking that you might want to keep your Dell because it isn't a bad computer. I am using one now. Then you can put your drives in an external enclosure like this:

Basically, take an old computer chassis and turn it into an external SAS enclosure. It takes a little work, and you just buy a memory upgrade for the Dell.

 

[suppaduppax]

Have you tried the chassis swap? I’ve spent countless hours on google and every single thing I can find says it’s a pain and not to do it. I’d be more comfortable if someone would guide me through it tho

 

[Chris Moore]

Have you tried the chassis swap? I’ve spent countless hours on google and every single thing I can find says it’s a pain and not to do it. I’d be more comfortable if someone would guide me through it tho

Not talking about a chassis swap. Look at the photo. That is an externally attached SAS drive enclosure that connects to a separate system where the CPU and RAM live.

 

[suppaduppax]

Ohhh. I see. I’ve done some research on that as well. So I would need a sas expander and a external hba. I have an idea. Would I be able to gut the r515 I was looking at and use the ram from that and the H200e hba and use the r515 essentially as the sas enclosure? Would I be able to somehow hook up that sas backplane?

 

[Chris Moore]

Ohhh. I see. I’ve done some research on that as well. So I would need a sas expander and a external hba. I have an idea. Would I be able to gut the r515 I was looking at and use the ram from that and the H200e hba and use the r515 essentially as the sas enclosure? Would I be able to somehow hook up that sas backplane?

Possibly. Here is another image to give you some ideas:
View attachment 23254
Also, here is a link to a build:
https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-cse-ptjbod-cb1-jbod-power-board-diy-jbod-chassis-made-easy/

This isn't exactly the same, but here is a video to give you an idea what it might look like in a rack chassis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_vmQMpBOWk

 

[Chris Moore]

You might like to look at the information on the Dell R510 in this article:
https://www.jonkensy.com/diy-sannas...le-shared-storage-with-a-twist-of-zfs-part-1/

 

[Chris Moore]

I finally found the thread I was looking for. This has a full list of parts with graphics, so have a look at this also:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/enclosure-question.54787/post-381041

Options.

 

[suppaduppax]

Hey Chris. Those were great reads! I’ve been looking for the right parts for the right price but haven’t gotten lucky yet.