AMD Threadripper build.

[Yorick]

Great to hear! You may want to stay away from 11.3 for now, some people have had intermittent freezing / crashing on Ryzen-class CPUs with that build. It's under investigation.

For redundant boot disk, I am wondering whether ZFS mirror is the best idea. That would not help the EFI boot in case of failure. I'm actually thinking that for the boot disk, a board-level RAID1 is a better choice. As far as FreeNAS is concerned it's still a single disk, and failures are handled by RAID1. That would also solve the question of booting on failure.

 

[newfreenas]

thank you for that info! I will need to find some literature on getting a redundant boot disk -- the goal is to boot on failure of one of the disks so if what you say is accurate yes I would be passing on zfs mirror and looking for what would help with that.

my hope is that in the event of a disk failure I simply get an email and need to replace a disk and I do some with confidence that there is no cahnge anything is lost.

 

[Apollo]

I did upgrade to 11.3 and while the process as been somewhat messy due to the boot disk crapping out during the install, my system hasn't shown any sign of weakness.
I have the main pool encrypted but no passphrase and after all was stable for a while, I replaced 2 of my disks which were showing signs of old age and the replacement within the encrypted pool has been easier than expected.
I have a few iocage jails (Nextcloud, plex, Netdata) and one Debian 10 VM running without issues.

The only thing that hasn't been fixed yet is the lockup when shutingdown the system. It will initiate shutdown, unmount the disk but system will still be ON consuming power at doing nothing.

 

[Yorick]

@Apollo , curious question: What is your use case for encrypting your disks?

I've pondered it and decided it's too much faff for raidz2. I could see it when using mirrored drives, just to be able to dispose of a failed or failing drive easily. For my desktop, where there's no redundancy, things are encrypted, again for that ease of disposal. With raidz2, I am reasoning that a single disk is pure data salad anyway, so why worry. I might think differently if I kept highly sensitive data on there, even snatches of the salad might be juicy - but I'm not, it's mostly media storage, encrypted PC backups, and a couple files.

 

[Apollo]

@Yorick, the idea behind encryption with passphrase was to prevent access to the data if the server was stollen. This makes sense if the system is powered down first.
Now that passphrase is no longer supported, this becomes more of a non-sense because the key is part of the boot volume and the boot volume is a SSD.
The only proper work around would be to secure the boot volume outside of the enclosure so it cannot be moved, but this is not going to happen.

All my other backup pools are also encrypted. I use them to handle replication tasks and I rotate them offsite.

 

[oumpa31]

Just got notice about this post I did a whole blog here about putting FreeNAS with a Threadripper 2920x

Freenas road to Threadripper

I know it has been a while since I posted here and I just wanted to give an update on how things are going. It has been an interesting 3 months. I started this box on FreeNAS 11.2 U6 since then it has been upgraded to U7. And now that FreeNAS 11.3 stable is out I am looking to upgrade to that...

forum.level1techs.com

I have had 0 issues with it freezing I did wait till 111.3-u1 came out before i updated it.

 

[drichard]

hey guys this is my first free nas build and I wanted to upload two build lists and get some feedback on them

1st build uses a
Norco 4U Rackmount Components RPC-4308 for the case
AsRock Rack X399D8A-2T
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X
Crucial 16GB Single DDR4 2666 MT ecc ram
Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black, 140mm Dual-Tower CPU Cooler
EVGA Super Nova 750 Ga, 80 Plus Gold Fully Modular, ECO Mode Compact 150mm Size, Power Supply

pros
"cheap" 12 core cpu
motherboard as 8 sata ports
type c port
dual 10g lan ports
8 ram slots so i can grow ram over time with a "cheap" 16 gig stick

cons
doesn't look like new models of the cpu will be made that will fit the motherboard after the second-gen
the motherboard is like $500
cant upgrade to 3rd gen unless I buy all new motherboard and cpu =$$$$

....just a note if I were to go this route I'm sure in 4 years when the Threadripper 2950X cpu comes down in price and I could upgrade to that and I dont see myself needing more. Threadripper 2950X should be around $300 and it will take me from a 11920x which is a 12cores/24 threads @ 3.5gh to a 16/32/3.5 or even a 24/48/3gh with the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 2970WX

Now build #2
Norco 4U Rackmount Components RPC-4308
motherboard = X470D4U2-2T
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6c/12t/3.8gh
Crucial 32GB Single DDR4 2666 MT ecc ram
Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black, 140mm Dual-Tower CPU Cooler
EVGA Super Nova 750 Ga, 80 Plus Gold Fully Modular, ECO Mode Compact 150mm Size, Power Supply

pros
cheaper over all build
has more promising upgrade life I.e I can skip from the 5 to the 9 series cpu the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core, 24 threads @3.8 ghz which will double the cores and threads of the 3600x and should be around $200 when its time to upgrade.
an even better cpu could come later

cons
4 ram slots so I'm forced to invest in 32 single sticks if I want to add ram later and not waste money
not type c port
less sata ports I want to say it has 4 or 6 (not sure)

....More notes..... even though build 2 has a more promising future as of right right now the jump form the 5 series to the 9 would only put me at the starting point of build #1 when it comes to power and speed, granted that this would be builds #1 ceiling and AMD could come out with a series 9 cpu that is equal to the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3970X @ 32/64/3.7ghz which I feel is a good upgrade over the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3960X



..................................................
now that all the specs are done here's what I'm hoping to achieve with the FreeNAS build

a back up of me and my partners' photography business
a time machine back up of at least 4 macs with at least 500 gigs of storage per device
my homes unifi camera footage
a windows 2019 server with a 500 gig hard drive I will mostly be using this as a testing dummy for work issues
a nextcloud jail to share files online with at least a 1tb of storage
I want to run the FreeNAS boot off of a M.2 drive fyi
I would like to use the other m.2 on the motherboard as a cache for the Nas to help with speed
Since the case has 8 bays I'm thinking I want to run a raidz2 but thanks to this link https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/zfs-pool-performance-2/# I'm not sure if I should run a raidz3 instead

ps. any help with that would be appreciated.


sigh so what do you think? Option 1 or 2?

 

[Yorick]

Literally nothing in your use case needs appreciable CPU. Not the backups, not nextcloud. So that’d suggest the second build.

Your gotcha is that 2019 server. Fine if you are going to run it headless, no graphics. But if you’re going to run that with a UI, you’re going to run into the same issues people had with Win10 on FreeNAS, which is that it is slow as molasses and no amount of CPU fixes that. At least “chances are high”. That might improve, as there’s a PR for pci passthrough into bhyve, and bhyve in 12.x is generally “better”. And, don’t hold your breath on that. FreeNAS is many things; a flexible, general purpose hypervisor platform it is not.