Building a 24 drive FreeNAS on Tyan

[trsupernothing]

Bringing back an old thread.

I am in the process of actually acquiring parts for this build now. I'd love some feedback on my hardware. I have in my possession thus far...

motherboard - Tyan S7025AGM2NR dual socket (not purchased for this project but am planning on using it)
cpus - 2 x Xeon X5680 (not purchased for this project but am planning on using it)

I need to purchase memory. The board maxes out at 64 gb. I'm hoping 64 will be enough for home use. (should be)

Case I am planning on is SC846E16-R1200B with BPN-SAS2-846EL1 backplane
I have an ibm m1015 card and think speeds should be sufficient with a single connection to the BPN-SAS2-846EL1 backplane

I know that the processors are overkill for freenas as I am not planning on even hosting any jails. This will be 100% freenas storage. A dual processor board is probably overkill as well... but I already have it laying around. I figure I'd waste the cpu's and board on this than spend several hundred dollars on less powerful hardware and still have the tyan board laying around.

Thanks for any feedback guys.

mod note: made new thread -JG. in re https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/Building-a-24-drive-Freenas-Rig.14782/

 

[jgreco]

Worst thing that could happen is that it won't work.

You might not need the R1200 power supply; some of the others are cheaper. Even the smaller duals offer massive starting amps for the drives because both supplies operate in tandem.

A single connection to the backplane is more than fine for at least 10Gbps of network connectivity; the 4x SAS2 wideport is 24Gbps of bandwidth to the backplane. In practice this doesn't seem to impact anything unless maybe you're using lots of SSD's on your pool.

 

[trsupernothing]

Thank's for the reply jgreco. I plan on using 6tb hgsts or wd reds across the board here so SSD's wont be a concern for speed. When I posted in this forum years ago about planning this project, I know that the proper drive layout was "suggested" for optimal

3-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 2 = 64KiB = good
4-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 3 = ~43KiB = BAD!
5-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 4 = 32KiB = good
9-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 8 = 16KiB = good
4-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 2 = 64KiB = good
5-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 3 = ~43KiB = BAD!
6-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 4 = 32KiB = good
10-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 8 = 16KiB = good

but that it wouldn't necessarily matter on home use. Now I see with newer versions of freenas that LZ4 Compression is enabled by default and the 128k striping optimization is no longer relevant at all correct?

 

[jgreco]

Still relevant, just less of an impact. Don't get too obsessed about it. If you have two proposed configurations that are otherwise similar and one's optimal by the rule, take that one.