building for speed in an office environment, looking for hardware advice

[Jon Tansey]

Hi

I'm researching a NAS box for work to replace our current WD mybook which was always a temporary measure and looking for some advice.

Our main requirement is speed, we work with a lot of large-ish files (mainly psds and illustrator documents in excess of 100MB) the combination of slow file transfers and the time it takes for the directory listing to appear in finder/explorer is really quite annoying so we want to speed that up!

We're probably after about 6-8 TB of storage and there'll be about 12 people using the file system.

Reading around I've manage to come up with a few loose requirements on specs but looking for some advice on specific hardware and configuration - cost isn't too much of an issue as provided I can justify it to my boss I can get what ever is required. Power draw and noise also aren't an issue as we're really after performance.

MOBO + CPU:
1155 socket i3 not sure on model
6xSATA
8 or 16GB of DDR3 RAM
maybe overkill but building for performance
any thoughts or recommendations greatly appreciated!

HDDs:
looking at 4 or 5 2TB drives @ 7200rpm
probably RAIDz1 as we have a robust cloud backup of all our data so failure wouldn't be catastrophic but would be nice not to grind to a halt if 1 drive fails
Am i right in thinking we should avoid green drives?
Will also try and spread manufacturers to avoid failures

Will stick it all in a decent case with a nice PSU and a UPS.

Thanks for reading and any advice on HDDs or CPU/MOBO combos would be greatly appreciated!

 

[sunflashx]

Supermicro SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O makes for a nice system.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182253
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115083

If you only need 4 drives worth of data, use the 4 SATA2 ports for the spinning disk, and put a SSD on one of the SATA3 ports for cache.

I'd put all 16GB of RAM in.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Like sunflashx said, 16GB isn't overkill, the more the merrier, RAM is pretty much the most bang for your buck these days so max it out. If you really want, I bet you could even force 4x8GB sticks in most motherboards. =]

I use green drives and still get decent performance. With a raid of 5 drives (4 data + 1 redundant) your'e likely to meet network bottlenecks (~1Gbps) before your local read/write performance is a bottleneck(~2400Gbps), at least this is my experience. Make sure to force 4k sectors on most harddrives, they pretty much all use them but some fake 512 as to be compatible.

As for harddrives, my raidz is 5xSamsung F4EG, I love these because there green, 5400rpm, and 3 platter, this all adds up to longer life. But our needs may very. If you decide to get these remember to force 4k, and update the firmware on them.

 

[paleoN]

Our main requirement is speed, we work with a lot of large-ish files (mainly psds and illustrator documents in excess of 100MB) the combination of slow file transfers and the time it takes for the directory listing to appear in finder/explorer is really quite annoying so we want to speed that up!

We're probably after about 6-8 TB of storage and there'll be about 12 people using the file system.

It's 12 people using it at the same time correct? I would probably consider 2 vdevs then for the additional iops. I will also echo everyone else in suggesting at least 16 GB of ram.

Reading around I've manage to come up with a few loose requirements on specs but looking for some advice on specific hardware and configuration - cost isn't too much of an issue as provided I can justify it to my boss I can get what ever is required. Power draw and noise also aren't an issue as we're really after performance.

In that case have you consider iX and TrueNAS or something similar? Support is nice to have when things break.

HDDs:
looking at 4 or 5 2TB drives @ 7200rpm
probably RAIDz1 as we have a robust cloud backup of all our data so failure wouldn't be catastrophic but would be nice not to grind to a halt if 1 drive fails
Am i right in thinking we should avoid green drives?
Will also try and spread manufacturers to avoid failures

Yes, you should avoid green drives for your build. If you go for 2 vdevs RAIDZ1 that would be 6 2TB drives with 4 usable for 8TB raw. I wouldn't worry about spreading manufacturers as they are all equally as bad. I would consider doing it on 2 orders or 2 vendors so they aren't shipped in the same box though.

 

[Jon Tansey]

Thanks for the advice guys much appreciated!

Whilst there will be 12 people using it it wont be all at the same time it'll vary depending on the tasks people are doing

we're based in the UK so iX and TrueNAS probably isn't a great option considering the time difference (for support) and the additional costs associated with importing.

It's going to be a couple of weeks before I build it as we're pretty busy at the moment launching a new web site but once I get round to it I'll make sure to post some benchmarks of the final build