BUILD Any issues with this build? Suggestions welcome.

[Kelie Bailey]

Greetings and salutations!
I've been planning on a FreeNAS build for a while, and I finally sat down and picked out some parts since I can afford this project. I was hoping to do it for ~$500, but realized $700 was probably more realistic.

I chose the BR10i because of the LSI chipset and the fact that I could disable RAID by flashing a different firmware and have it run in Initator-Target mode so I can setup a ZFS Pool. Oh, and it's cheap...like $36 cheap. Originally, I was going to get a Dell PERC 6/i card and have each disk configured as a single-disk RAID-0 virtual disk, since the PERC doesn't have a proper JBOD mode.. but that seemed silly...and of course I don't want to run hardware raid since I've chosen ZFS.

I've picked out modest and solid looking Intel based motherboard + CPU with expansion slots for my controller and perhaps some NIC teaming down the road if I ever get a managed gig switch that supports it. I wish server-class motherboards and ECC RAM were within my price range, but it is not. Perhaps I'll do snapshots and work out some sort of archiving/backup solution later.
Then, it's all going inside of a solid looking rackmount case with a standard PSU.

So, yeah...I think I'm on the right track, I just wanted to check with the community to see if they could predict any show-stoppers, or make any suggestions to improve this build.

• IBM ServeRAID BR10i SAS/SATA Controller - LSI SAS1068E chipset, Flash from IR to IT mode firmware purchased
• 3x Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Drive (more later)
• Adaptec Mini SAS SFF-8087 36-PIN to 4 SATA 7-PIN Cable purchased
• Kingston HyperX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
• Gigabyte GA-P75-D3 - Intel B75 Express Chipset
• Intel Celeron G1610 Ivy Bridge 2.6GHz LGA 1155
• Thermaltake TR2 TR-700 700W PSU
• Rosewill RSV-L4000 Server Chassis

Oh, and one other side-note: I do not yet have my replacement credit card, so I've been trying to stick to Newegg and eBay since they both accept PayPal which I have linked to my bank account.

Thank you for your time!

 

[cyberjock]

You do realize that the BR10i doesn't support disks bigger than 2TB, right? So what you build will not be upgradable later to bigger disks.

Other than that, not using ECC can backfire in catastrophic ways. But the choice is yours, you seem to understand that your pool and all backups will potentially be unrecoverable, and you know this. It's a gamble that many will win, but not everyone.

 

[Kelie Bailey]

Yes, I realize that limitation. I figure I'll start with three drives, with a maximum of eight. With 16GB of raw storage, I'd have almost 11 GB usable with RAID-Z2. Since I've only got a couple TB of data that I need to store right now, this should be adequate for the imminent future. As far as memory corruption... I just did a little searching around, and I think I may want to go the ECC route anyway. I was under the impression that ZFS was fault tolerant, but it looks like a flipped bit or bad block is directly written to disk which apparently can cause system instability. Do you know of any budget boards that support ECC and are similar to the one I've chosen? Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

I went with a relatively inexpensive X9SCM-F-O for about $160. You can couple that with the G2020 for ECC support for cheap. The board has IPMI, ECC Support, onboard video, and dual Intel NIC. Mine idles at 35w with no disks(but I'm using the E3-1230v2 CPU). I can't imagine a better board(especially for that price).

And just let me put on record that I never condone using non-ECC RAM with ZFS after seeing how destructive a single-bit failure of non-ECC RAM is to a zpool. I really didn't think it would be that bad(my first server was non-ECC). But after seeing it on the forum I consider it to be analogous to drinking and driving. You might be safe to do it tonight, and maybe even tomorrow night. But it only takes that one night of being stupid to ruin things really badly for the long term. It just can't be understated how destructive a single-bit failure can be to a zpool. ZFS can protect from errors, but it cannot protect from corruption from the RAM itself(nothing really can).

 

[Kelie Bailey]

Yeah, after doing a little more reading (and seeing your comment about doing scrubs with bad ram ) I think I'm going to go ahead and get the supermicro board and proc you suggested, and I think I'll start out with 8GB of some unbuffered pc3 10600. I guess my budget went up, but after nearly losing a standalone external drive years ago (thank god for a sort-of up to date backup) I promised myself I'd never jeopardize my data like that again.
I'm starting to get excited! I finally get to build something with server class components. Too bad I can't go Xenon and 10K drives. Also, using a Compact flash card with a CF-to-SATA adapter with the disk image shouldn't be a problem, right?

 

[cyberjock]

Nope, but USB is definitely preferred. If you later have a problem and make a thread that mentions you are using FreeNAS on SATA you can expect some comments about it. Even a good $10 8GB USB stick(link is what I've been using for 18+ months on 4 machines) should last you years, so there's no real reason to go with a CF-to-SATA adapter.

 

[Kelie Bailey]

Done and done. Again, thanks for the suggestions. I was all ready to buy everything, but I'm glad I took the time to ask the forums. I think I'll sit on this for another day or two in case I change my mind about anything. It'll give me some time to think about how I want to handle my zpool/VDev configuration. I think I'll start with 4 drives, but I'll probably completely rebuild the pool when I get the other 4(2tb) drives. It would be a waste of space to do a raid-z2 2+2 vdev and add another 2+2 vdev later. I'd only have half of my space usable. I'd want to redo it as a 6+2 drive vdev if I'm understanding your noob slideshow correctly. I've never done anything with ZFS, so this is just my best guess after a few hours of research.

 

[cyberjock]

You know, if you read the manual and the stickies you'd know everything that has been discussed in this thread......

 

[Kelie Bailey]

Terribly sorry, sir. I've skimmed, googled and searched for most of my questions first and usually only revert to forums as a last resort or to confirm that I'm understanding correctly. I'll be sure to check those other resources first if I have any further questions. Thank you for your time.