AMD Threadripper build.

[newfreenas]

In the link you provided, I am being redirected to Amazon showing the M version of the board. I would avoid it has it has only 4 DDR4 slots which limit you to 64GB.
I would suggest you go with the X399 (Without the M) has it supports 8 DDR4 slots and more NVME slots.

wow good catch I must have had too many browser tabs open....

I would like extra room to scale hard drives but will not need that room right away, this is why I was looking at larger cases.

> I would leave USB and use SATA SSD instead. Kingston 400 series is good.

any particular reason why? I'm fine with either just thought I'd be saving room and would not be much of a performance difference -- but I do not have experience with either just saw people online using USB successfuly in similar rigs...

 

[Apollo]

> I would leave USB and use SATA SSD instead. Kingston 400 series is good.

any particular reason why? I'm fine with either just thought I'd be saving room and would not be much of a performance difference -- but I do not have experience with either just saw people online using USB successfuly in similar rigs...

I have used various USB stick brands and all of them would turn bat at some point. They are just not resilient enough, mostly due to scrubbing. No point going for the expensive USB sticks which might still be borderline reliable, the SSD seems to be the better option.
Just don't go with the SP brand. First time scrub and it bricked the SSD.
I have used the Kingston SSD V200 on my desktop for many years and they have been running flawlessly. With my new PC I have repurposed them as Boot storage for Freenas and for a while for my pfsense.
I have bought a few of the V400 (I think) which I am using as my Freenas boot drives and also to perform some testing for my iocage jails.
I have the 120GB versions.
Samsung would have been possibly better but they don't have anything at or below 120GB which makes then overkill and overpriced.
With SSD, you should expect faster updates, faster boot up and higher reliability.
The main drawback is the requirement for one available SATA port.

 

[newfreenas]

> If I didn't have the case already, I might have gone with a smaller forma factor.

what case would you have gone for.


to add, I need 20TB to start... I can see this going up to more than doubling but not for at least 2 years. (I think... a lot of guesswork here...) which is why I wanted an oversize case to scale....

 

[Apollo]

> If I didn't have the case already, I might have gone with a smaller forma factor.

what case would you have gone for.

to add, I need 20TB to start... I can see this going up to more than doubling but not for at least 2 years. (I think... a lot of guesswork here...) which is why I wanted an oversize case to scale....

The drives themselves are not getting very hot. As long as there is a minimum flow any case would do.
Desktop cases are wider so heatsink fans are not going to be an issue.
You can look for similar case as the
Fractal Design - Define R4
Fractal Design - Define R5

It is a matter of taste, money and availability.
Depending on your use case, number of drives and density will dictate your SATA port availability and case capacity.
You can do 20TB volume with 4 disk RAIDZ-2 ( 2 * 10TB data + 2 * 10TB redundancy)
Two years from now 10 TB drive should be more accessible, but you will also have access to 14TB and beyond.

The better approach at expanding would be to start a new volume with the new capacity and replicate your old volume to the new one. So it would be easy not to exceed 8 disk solutions.
Replication over LAN would be the prefered method. You will need backup anyway and replication is one way of doing it.

 

[newfreenas]

Thank you!

so....I bought 2950x, x399 asrock taichi, and wraith ripper at microcenter, couple sales on each and got extra bundled

in a moment of haste (it was mobbed) I bought ripjaws forgetting I wanted ecc RAM and remembering they were considered resistent to rowhammer......and I was seduced by their sale...so I will need to return those and keep looking for suitable RAM that is under 40mm in height (I think that is clearance for closest RAM under wraith ripper...)



I got 6 8TB drives for now [0] as I thought it was good bang for buck

still searching for a 'deal' on 16gb ram looking for 64GB sticks to start.... let me know if you know of a black friday/cybermonday sale...paying attention now so I do not make same mistake. very excited



last items I am looking at are case, power supply and UPS (if reasonable) and still considering GeForce GTX 1070 Ti... if anyone has an opinion please feel free to shre!


thank you again for everyones comments and support! very excited... hopefully in another week I'll have something to play with :)


[0] https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-Platform-HUH728080ALE604-Enterprise/dp/B0100ZCS6I (Enterprise Grade 3.5" Hard Drive, For Server, NAS, RAID System)

 

[Apollo]

Why the GTX 1070 Ti, i it for your Freenas box? That would beoverkill unless there is the ability for a VM to make use of it, which I am not aware.

 

[Robocop86]

Hi,

I have been running a Freenas on my remodeled PC for about 1 year now with these parts. It's a former windowsbased Plex machine. I have had the same problems with Ryzen as other people with crashes now and then.

• Samsung 850-Series PRO 256GB
• ASUS PRIME X370-PRO
• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 4.0 GHz 20MB
• Fractal Design R7 Svart
• Fractal Design Edison M 750W
• Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2666Mhz CL16 Vengeance
• be quiet! Shadow Rock LP
• ASUS GeForce GT 710 2GB LP
• 7 WD Red 8TB

Now I want a new case, the Node 804 which is my dream case, but there wasn't a motherboard (matx) that had my spec with 8 Sata until now, the Taichi x399m. I will buy that case and mobo, but was wondering which CPU and RAM I should choose? I really like Ryzen for the benchmark score and price.

 

[Apollo]

Hi,

I have been running a Freenas on my remodeled PC for about 1 year now with these parts. It's a former windowsbased Plex machine. I have had the same problems with Ryzen as other people with crashes now and then.

• Samsung 850-Series PRO 256GB
• ASUS PRIME X370-PRO
• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 4.0 GHz 20MB
• Fractal Design R7 Svart
• Fractal Design Edison M 750W
• Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2666Mhz CL16 Vengeance
• be quiet! Shadow Rock LP
• ASUS GeForce GT 710 2GB LP
• 7 WD Red 8TB

Now I want a new case, the Node 804 which is my dream case, but there wasn't a motherboard (matx) that had my spec with 8 Sata until now, the Taichi x399m. I will buy that case and mobo, but was wandering which CPU and RAM I should choose? I really like Ryzen for the benchmark score and price.

With the x399m, you can only use the Threadripper series.
You will need ECC memory to have the piece of mind. Any DDR4 UDIMM 8GB or 16GB per stick should work, ut you really need to get the 16GB stick if you plan on maxing out the RAM capacity.

 

[Apollo]

Thank you!

so....I bought 2950x, x399 asrock taichi, and wraith ripper at microcenter, couple sales on each and got extra bundled

in a moment of haste (it was mobbed) I bought ripjaws forgetting I wanted ecc RAM and remembering they were considered resistent to rowhammer......and I was seduced by their sale...so I will need to return those and keep looking for suitable RAM that is under 40mm in height (I think that is clearance for closest RAM under wraith ripper...)



I got 6 8TB drives for now [0] as I thought it was good bang for buck

still searching for a 'deal' on 16gb ram looking for 64GB sticks to start.... let me know if you know of a black friday/cybermonday sale...paying attention now so I do not make same mistake. very excited



last items I am looking at are case, power supply and UPS (if reasonable) and still considering GeForce GTX 1070 Ti... if anyone has an opinion please feel free to shre!


thank you again for everyones comments and support! very excited... hopefully in another week I'll have something to play with :)


[0] https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-Platform-HUH728080ALE604-Enterprise/dp/B0100ZCS6I (Enterprise Grade 3.5" Hard Drive, For Server, NAS, RAID System)

Any update you can provide? I am curious if you were able to get all the part and is already running Freenas. What is your impression so far?

 

[Robocop86]

With the x399m, you can only use the Threadripper series.
You will need ECC memory to have the piece of mind. Any DDR4 UDIMM 8GB or 16GB per stick should work, ut you really need to get the 16GB stick if you plan on maxing out the RAM capacity.

Yeah I know, but it was the only matx board that I could findwith 8 Sata ports.

Is it worth it to buy a Threadripper now or should I wait for the new Ryzen series to comeout?

 

[Apollo]

Yeah I know, but it was the only matx board that I could findwith 8 Sata ports.

Is it worth it to buy a Threadripper now or should I wait for the new Ryzen series to comeout?

Tough decision. Any info on the new Ryzen series? I haven't followed up on that.
For me, the 1900X came at a fairly decent price, slightly cheaper than what was offered during Black Friday sales.

I just updated from 11.2-RC1 to 11.2-Release after 50 days of uninterupted operation.

 

[pro lamer]

Hi!

Sintel 4K screenshot, I just ran a few minutes ago, 5 instances of Sintel 4K in Firefox.
The original file is 4K @ 40.6Mbps.
On screenshots you can see transcoding at 84.2Mbps on 2 Firefox instances and 63.2 for the other 2. The last one I can't say.
At that time CPU what able to hit 100% usage and hit in the high 90 degrees C.
For this run, 1900x hasn't crashed and is on its 27th day without reboot.

Are they h.265? What fps? Did they buffer?

Sent from my phone

 

[newfreenas]

Any update you can provide? I am curious if you were able to get all the part and is already running Freenas. What is your impression so far?

pending RAM/CASE -- end of this week :) went with define R6

I see my mobo (x399 Taichi) does not have HDMI, how did you initially configure? On a seaparate box? Eventually this will not need a monitor but assumed at start would need and also to update BIOS... had decided against graphics card but it appears I need one?

 

[Apollo]

Hi!
Are they h.265? What fps? Did they buffer?

The Sintel 4K video are h264 @49Mb/s.
My main PC is more powerfull than my Freenas box, better everything, so I didn't experience major issues. Of course, at 100% CPU load,it is expected to cause slight drop in frames, but almost imperceptible at the time and only one the last video which was started last because it had trouble building the cache with transcoded data. RED drives are not the fastest drives out there and it will be the main bottleneck for such system I think, due to the latency.
It is my understanding PLEX is going to transcode in burst so having multiple transcoding will be performed concurrently as well as interleaved.
I guess, the more RAM, the larger the cache used by PLEX and the larger the buffering time.

 

[Apollo]

pending RAM/CASE -- end of this week :) went with define R6

I see my mobo (x399 Taichi) does not have HDMI, how did you initially configure? On a seaparate box? Eventually this will not need a monitor but assumed at start would need and also to update BIOS... had decided against graphics card but it appears I need one?

Yes, you need a video card. A low end card should work.
While you could manage swapping with a temporary card, you still want to have the ability of visually BIOS, as you said, but more importantly been able to check for the state of the console or interact with the console, at least at first. When system will be stable for a while, then you could remove the video card, but then you may experience issues due to updates or iocage malfunction or th whatsnot and be appraised of the issue and possibly find a mean to gain access to the system.
I found, that sometimes, iocage or other network related issue could prevent the GUI from being accessed or GUI will terminate, but the chance is that SSH will most likely work and you could still interact with the system.
You could also use the UART/ serial interface for a true headless system. I have not tried that, so I can't comment on it.

 

[pro lamer]

You could also use the UART/ serial interface for a true headless system. I have not tried that, so I can't comment on it.

Trying to hijack my ideas are you? ;)

you could remove the video card, but then you may experience issues

Neither I'd recommend a temporary GPU. Thinking of a scenario:
1. Install GPU
2. Install FreeNAS
3. Remove GPU
4. Install a HBA instead/any other add-on
5. Everything works fine
6. Something stops working one day
7. You remove the HBA card and put the GPU back
8. Now it works again. This means one will now have a problem troubleshooting the system (has the HBA broken down or the update doesn't have the driver) etc

Some other wild guesses of me:

Does the motherboard support bifurcation?

Or a USB attached GPU but this is a very wild guess and may not work with BSD or FreeNAS. Dunno

Sent from my phone

 

[Apollo]

Trying to hijack my ideas are you? ;)
Does the motherboard support bifurcation?

I try to do preemptive thinking.
One question about that. yesterday, I tried to install one of my NVME SSD to use as a cache on the M.2 slot but started getting some errors.
The output was similar to what was reported on this post.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/nvme-m-2-issues.55912/

As a result I started looking at the bifurcation explaination. I need to dig into this in order to make sense of it.
Taichi BIOS is using terminollogy that I am not familiar with and should find some meaning into AMD datasheet somehow.
How can you tell if motherboard support this feature?
Well searching for the term led me to understand the basics.
As far I could tell, bifurcation is available on Taichi as I did change the setting, but I didn't have it set when NVME was in. However, NVME is 4 PCIe lanes so why the need to bifurcate then?

I will have to do some experimenting when I have a chance.

 

[newfreenas]

case arrived so close!!

think a HDMI to USB-C might work instead of gettinga GPU? if not, can you recommend a low end GPU just for this purpose?

 

[Apollo]

case arrived so close!!

think a HDMI to USB-C might work instead of gettinga GPU? if not, can you recommend a low end GPU just for this purpose?

I think the Taichi has onboard Type-C connector or is my main PC video card. Anyway, I doubt they have implemented a driver to support display-port over USB Type-C.
You can get a low end Nvidia PCIe video card. You don't want to break the bank there and you do not want something that will draw too much power.
Take a video card that boast different display connector. This way you will have more option when time comes to connect to a monitor.

 

[pro lamer]

However, NVME is 4 PCIe lanes so why t

I thought about the GPU occupying the x16 slot. IIRC there are some GPUs that don't need all 16 lanes (or whatever the x16 stands for) and one could use a PCI e riser to convert a single x16 slot into for example two x8 slots... Edit: and put a GPU into one of them and other stuff into the other

Sent from my phone