Build Advice Requested

[PhantmShado]

Hello all, I have finally grown quite sick of the speeds I get from my prebuilt NAS (10miB/s tops) and saw that people here were more complaining about 50miB/s, so I'd really like to get in on that, and would like some tips.

Currently my prebuilt NAS has 4 SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245) in RAID5. I am able to back up all contents to reformat the disks and do plan to reuse them. Looking around the forum it seems the way to go is to use ZFS Raid-Z1 on these drives. My basic build idea thrown together from what information I could infer is:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=27742968

I picked the mobo for the 6 SATA ports and the intel NIC which seems to have better support (though I really don't understand why many seem to be seeking the dual ethernet port, can someone explain the advantage/use to me please?)
I picked the 8gb of ram as my understanding of the guide was this was the recommended amount for RAIDS up to 8TB, and with redundancy with my current 4 drives I'd be at 6TB, so this even allows me a growth of a drive, which would get me to 5 drives which the literature indicates performs more optimally for Raid-Z1. Is this a good pick of RAM? Could it bottle neck me? If so I'd rather spend more now than replace later.
I picked the chipset and i3 as http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?7781-FreeNAS-performance-advice-on-new-system seemed to indicate picking a slower proc could bottle neck a system of this capacity.
Case, psu, and flash drive (literature seems to indicate this is supposed to be installed on a flash drive) were picked arbitrarily, please let me know if there are any issues with those.

Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

8GB of RAM should be good for you even with 5 disks. 16GB 'might' help performance. You didn't mention which i3 you have. The lowest frequency may bottleneck you(but I'd expect more than 10MB/sec). You didn't say whether you use CIFS or NFS. CIFS is single threaded. You want a CPU that has more powerful cores, which typically means less of them too. I have the highest speed i3 Westmere and I can saturate 2 Gb NICs at the same time.

5 drives would help raw performance, but your bottleneck is almost certainly going to be your NIC(after you find the problem with 10MB/sec speeds).

People usually do 2 NICs because they set up their family to use 1 port and their desktop uses another. In business environments it can help alot of you are serving a high number of users.

You could try doing a DD benchmark and see what speeds you get. If your DD is really slow you have a hardware issue. If you have a hard drive that is failing on your pool you will also get crazy results.

 

[PhantmShado]

i3-2100 as mentioned in the newegg link (sandy bridge 3.1ghz dual core).

I currently just have a prebuilt LG nas, and from what I've seen any prebuilt beating that speed is a feat, so I don't think that is worth looking into. It uses CIFS to share and I would probably aim to continue that.

Also, what do you mean when you say this setup will saturate a gib nic? Does this mean read speeds cap at 125miB/s? That seems quite high. Also, do you have an estimate for where write speeds bottle neck under this setup? I would imagine it is much lower.

 

[cyberjock]

Ah. I tried to open the link but got an error. Now it works. LOL

When I say saturate I typically end up with 115MB/sec+ on both NICs at the same time. :) Can't get much better than that.

If you do a DD, ideally you'd want anything above about 250MB/sec. My setup(16 drives) gets about 450MB/sec write, which of course is limited to the 230MB/sec of both NICs simultaneously.

What model is your prebuilt NAS?

As for your current build, I'm a believer in size does matter. I avoid the tiny cases whenever possible because they often run pretty hot. For that price you should be able to pick out a bigger case. If you go to standard ATX, you can find a motherboard that has more available slots for possible expansion and a CPU for a little less. There are nice Gigabyte motherboards that are full ATX for $120 that are very good. I use those often for desktops for friends and relatives. You may need to buy an Intel NIC though. Also, going for full ATX you will get 4 ram slots, so you can upgrade to 16GB later if desired/needed. There is no such thing as too much RAM. :P The thumbrule of 4GB + 1GB for each TB of hard drive space would put you a little thin at just 8GB. See the guide in my sig for a good noobie guide for some common mistakes noobies make.

The short answer is that unless you are really looking for size, you'll pay extra for the smaller size and at the cost of expandability later. But if you're looking for a computer you plan to shove under your bed and forget about for the next 2 years, ITX is the way to go.

If you change nothing, I'd expect you to get at least 50MB/sec from your setup. Your biggest "limitations" of your build will be the limited number of available slots to install hard drives and 2 slots for RAM.

 

[PhantmShado]

Wait, I thought each NIC was capped at 115, how are you getting it to 230?

My NAS is the one reviewed at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/...ay-super-multi-nas-with-blu-ray-disc-rewriter which indicates that my speeds were actually not at all where they should have been. I did recently change out my cables for some monoprice ones (and am even on a different switch as a result of the project), but haven't since tested my speeds. I think I should try again... Or maybe they just have faster drives?

But if you think with the fifth drive and that 16gb of ram I could hit 100mB/s write speeds, I would still want to build. I am a little space constrained, but if you think I could end up using about the same amount of power at the wall, I'm open to other 6 drive case suggestions that area little larger that you like. I could measure up after that and see where I am.

 

[survive]

Hi PhantmShado,

I'm with noobsauce80 on the size....if you can, go a little bigger, you will be much happier.

Here's a list of parts I would substitute:

Case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352008

Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182252

Memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262

Swapping out your parts for these as appropriate totals $491.94.

I would be tempted to go with this PSU simply because I'm a huge fan of SeaSonic:PSU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151072

Adding 2 more of the Samsung drives gets the total up to $731.92.

-Will

 

[PhantmShado]

Would there be any advantage to adding 2 more of the drives instead of just one? Either was I'd ideally stick with an 8tb raid, right?

 

[survive]

Hi PhantmShado,

Well if you add 2 drives you could do a 6 drive raidz2, which is something I would certainly consider. Keep in mind that you really have one chance to do this right.....it's not like you can go and add another drive to the pool and do some sort of raid -level migration.

I'm a big fan of "build it right, build it once" and with any luck once you got the system together and & zip-tied up all nice & neat you shouldn't have to open the case ever again (except to replace a failed drive).

-Will

 

[cyberjock]

THe theoretical maximum for Gb is 133MB/sec. I can achieve about 115MB/sec on each of my two NICs. That brings the total to 230MB/sec. Of course, if I'm transferring one file to/from the NAS to one workstation I cannot exceed the speed of 1 NIC. 2 NICs simply allow me to assign 2 different computes different IPs to the FreeNAS server to prevent a bottleneck of 1 NIC's speed.

Edit: Your old NAS is an Intel Atom. That's why the performance is so low. Atoms just don't have the power to cut it as a NAS if you want high speeds. They're great in an office environment if you're serving up Word and Excel files, but for just about anything else it's not a good choice.

 

[PhantmShado]

Ok, tested again with some sustained writes of mp3s and mkvs and am seeing between 40 and 50mB/s. I'd still be highly interested in building if I could hit the theorhetical limit each way though.

Also, could you tell me the advantages of RaidZ2 over RaidZ1?

 

[cyberjock]

RAIDZ2 allows for 1 more disk failure. Performance will be slightly slower due to the extra parity data that must be calculated.

 

[cyberjock]

What setup did you use to get the 40-50MB/s speed? If your design had 16GB of RAM instead of 8, you should be able to max out a NIC easily. Of course, there are other factors involved, such as the destination machine and the NIC of the destination machine. I only use Intel NICs because they seem to perform so much better than everything else I've ever used.

 

[Stephens]

RAIDZ1 allows 1 drive to fail and you still maintain your data. RAIDZ2 allows 2 drives to fail and you'll still maintain your data. Many people (including me) go with RAIDZ2 because if you use RAIDZ1, until you get if you have a drive failure, your data is essentially unprotected until you get a replacement drive and rebuild the array (which will take a long time). Additionally, sometimes the very act of rebuilding the array stresses drives to the point where another marginal one fails. It's just what your comfortable with. Since I got my 2TB drives for $100 USD, it was a no-brainer to use RAIDZ2 over RAIDZ1 in my case. My data's worth the extra $100.

 

[PhantmShado]

I used synctoy between windows and my LG nas for the 40-50 speeds.

How long sustained writing could I max out the NIC? Or should it be perpetual with that much ram?

 

[cyberjock]

It depends on a lot of factors. I mentioned 16GB because 8 could hold back your performance. FreeNAS loves RAM, and the more the better. While you can skimp on a high end expensive CPU, RAM is something you should never skimp on if you will be using ZFS.

I've never heard of synctoy so I googled it. Interesting tool, I'll have to mess with it a little.