BUILD 24 Drive Build Suggestions - Help!

[Jeci]

Hello Guys,

I know a lot of you have large FreeNas builds & I'm looking at upgrading from my HP N40L w/ 5x2TB drives RAIDz, to something that can ultimately store 24 drives & i'm a little lost on what hardware would achieve this without breaking the bank entirely.

This box won't be running a full 24 drives initially, but rather expansion will go something like:

1. starting off with a 8 x 2TB in RAIDz2 array initially w/ a single LSI HBA
2. then once that's filled, add a 8 x 4TB in RAIDz2 array adding an additional LSI HBA
3. then once that's filled, add a 8 x 4TB in RAIDz2 array adding a 3rd and final LSI HBA

So hardware wise I found threads with people trying to achieve similar end goals, but obviously technology moves on and better/newer hardware comes out.

My thoughts on hardware so far are as follows:

• Case : X-Case RM 424 - 24 Hotswap Bay 6GB Mini SAS (SATA/SAS Backplane) - Rail Kit included
• CPU: AMD 8320 (Great bang for the buck, and lots of cores)
• Memory: 32GB (Fairly non-descript, not sure if ECC is worth it as this is just for home use)
• Motherboard: SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 (Basically picked at random, looks like a feature packed board)
• Storage: I already own 5 x 2TB WD RED's for stage 1, so will purchase an additional 3.
• PSU: 850Watt Corsair (Again, fairly non-descript)
• Expansion: LSI HBA (Not sure of model, did have a look for the recommended IBM HBA's but in the UK they retail for £100 + P&P)
• Cache Drive: Crucial M4 128GB

All of the above components have been somewhat picked at random, for their good price/performance - I'm 10000% open to suggestions, if people think it would be worth going for a quad core xeon or ECC memory for whatever reasons then i'm totally open to those suggestions.

Equally if 32GB of RAM and an 8-core AMD processor is probably going to be overkill, then I'll scale back.

Any help is massively appreciated, even if it's pointing me to other build-logs that I somehow managed to miss when scouring the forums.

 

[Jeci]

Edit - I'm now looking @ the following for the core components:

• Xeon E3-1225
• SuperMicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
• 32GB (4x8 sticks or 2x16 sticks) ECC RAM
• 1x LSI SAS 9211-8l (initially with capacity for another 2 at a later stage)

I'm not sure if this is provides enough CPU grunt...