BUILD C226, i3, 10 drive build

[indy]

Basically I want a new central storage place that gets rid of all my external and internal hard drives, save for one SSD per PC.
Items to store will be movies, games, photos, personal and work related stuff... sooo pretty much a mix of everything.
Like many ideas it started small and finally escalated to a full server.

[panel]Actual configuration (don't mind the thread-title)

Basic Parameters:

• raidz3, 11 drives
• ECC Memory
• AES Encryption
• LZ4 Compression

Hard Drives: 11x Western Digital Red 4GB
Board: Supermicro X10SL7-F
CPU: Intel E3-1220 v3
Cooler: Noctua NH-L12
RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM Server Premier 8GB, DDR3L-1600 (KVR16LE11/8KF)
PSU: Sea Sonic Platinum Series Fanless 400W
USB-Stick: Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8GB
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 PCGH-Edition
HDD-Adapter: Lian-Li EX-23NB
UPS: CyberPower DL Series 450VA[/panel]

Suggestions / criticism / ideas are highly welcome!

Show : Original configuration

Basic Parameters:
RaidZ2, 10 Drives
ECC Memory
AES Encryption

Hard Drives: 10x Western Digital Red 3GB
Board: AsRock C226 WS
CPU: Intel i3-4330
RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM Intel DIMM 8GB, DDR3-1600, CL11, ECC (KVR16E11/8I)
PSU: Sea Sonic Platinum Series Fanless 400W
USB-Stick: 2x Kingston DataTraveler Micro 8GB
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 PCGH-Edition
UPS: APC Back-UPS Pro 550VA

 

[Richman]

Wow, nice bank account balance ................... I mean hardware list.

 

[cyberjock]

Seriously, I'd never buy an aftermarket cooler for Intel. It's money down the drain. At least for a server. Overclocking a server is.. stupid. And the Intel cooler is already so incredibly overbuilt to start with there's no point in trying to cool it more. Not to mention 99% of the time your CPU will be asleep.

AES encryption doesn't inhibit future ZFS versions, but you'll be forced to mount the pool only on systems with geli support(which I think is only FreeBSD/FreeNAS).

 

[indy]

Wow, nice bank account balance ................... I mean hardware list.

Spending over 1000€ on hard drives makes me kind of uncomfortable as well...
I am thinking about the 2Tb drives, since I do not think I will need that much space in the near future.
But then again the 3Tb drives have the best value for money ratio.
Idk, I will have to think about it a little more ;)

I never really thought about overclocking, just from my (gaming-)pc experience the stock coolers were either running hot or noisy.
But I guess you are right about the the cpu being mostly in idle.

Anyway, thanks for the input so far guys.

 

[SweetAndLow]

How are you going to run 10 drives? That board has 6 data ports.

 

[indy]

The AsRock C226 WS is one of the few (maybe only?) 1150 Xeon board that has 10x SATA onboard.
6x C226 and 2x2 88SE9172

 

[KevinM]

Basic Parameters:

• RaidZ2, 10 Drives
• ECC Memory
• AES Encryption

Hard Drives: 10x Western Digital Red 3GB
Board: AsRock C226 WS
CPU: Intel i3-4330
RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM Intel DIMM 8GB, DDR3-1600, CL11, ECC (KVR16E11/8I)
PSU: Sea Sonic Platinum Series Fanless 400W
USB-Stick: 2x Kingston DataTraveler Micro 8GB
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 PCGH-Edition
UPS: APC Back-UPS Pro 550VA

Ideas / suggestions / criticism are highly welcome!

You might want to consider the Supermicro X10SL7-F-O instead of the AsRock. It has an 8-port LSI 2308 SAS controller, which AFAIK can be cross-flashed to IT mode. (I've done this myself with an earlier X9 motherboard and an IBM M1015 card.) Combined with the six onboard ports, this would give you 14 SATA ports total. The supermicro is a C222 board, but I don't think 3GB/S SATA is going to matter with non-SSD drives.

Supermicro and LSI hardware are well supported in FreeNAS. I'm less certain about the Marvell SE9172 chipset in the AsRock.

The general recommendation is for 1 GB per TB of storage, but this may not matter for your use case.

I'm a Supermicro whore so I'm not sure how objective I am. Other than that it looks like a bitchin setup.

 

[ZFS Noob]

You know, more memory won't hurt...

 

[indy]

Supermicro and LSI hardware are well supported in FreeNAS. I'm less certain about the Marvell SE9172 chipset in the AsRock.

Does the chipset / driver matter as long as it can be set to AHCI?

Still, I will take a good look at your mainboard recommendation.
I guess it would be a good idea to build on hardware that has already proven itself reliable.
However, is the crossflashing procedure even authorized by Supermicro/LSI?

About the memory, for the initial setup I mostly just want to ensure ZFS runs stable.
If there should be performance issues as the drives start to fill up sometime in the future, I will probably upgrade.

 

[JohnK]

Always feels like a waste having a Freenas server with hdmi and onboard audio. Also 10 drives might run hot inside that case, not that I have any idea what that edition stands for. Some German sites seems to have information, but I'm too sober to try my German.

 

[JohnK]

Does the chipset / driver matter as long as it can be set to AHCI?

Still, I will take a good look at your mainboard recommendation.
I guess it would be a good idea to build on hardware that has already proven itself reliable.
However, is the crossflashing procedure even authorized by Supermicro/LSI?

I have not flashed my X10SL7 yet, but the software required is available on SuperMicro site. You do those things at your own risk though. I just crossflashed a M1015 for my backup server and it is a real simple process.

 

[KevinM]

Does the chipset / driver matter as long as it can be set to AHCI?

Still, I will take a good look at your mainboard recommendation.
I guess it would be a good idea to build on hardware that has already proven itself reliable.
However, is the crossflashing procedure even authorized by Supermicro/LSI?

LSI could easily disable cross-flashing if it had a mind to, but my guess is they're happy as long as they're selling controllers.

The Marvell chipset shouldn't matter. Many of the folks here have had very good luck with Supermicro boards, Intel NICs and LSI HBAs, to the extent that they are pretty much the default recommendation. Not to say there is anything wrong with AsRock, Marvel, or anyone else.

You mentioned elsewhere about considering 10 x 2TB RAIDZ2 drives for cost reasons. Newegg sometimes has 4TB drives on sale for $150 or so, and a 6 x 4TB RAIDZ2 would provide about the same usable space as a 10 x 2TB RAIDZ2. It would cost less to run, and you'd be able to fit it into a smaller case like an FD Mini.

There are a lot of ways to set up a FreeNAS box and a lot of the time there isn't one choice that is obviously better than another. Good luck, and welcome to the forum.

 

[indy]

My first build idea was a 6x 4TB.
I agree, compared with 10x 2TB it would fit a smaller case (especially that nice Node 304) and consume less energy.
However it has a slightly higher initial cost and can't really be expanded too much just by swapping out the disks.
In general, 'wasting' 1/3 of the disk space on parity... idk, it just seems too much.
Pretty though descision.
Thanks for the welcome btw :)

Always feels like a waste having a Freenas server with hdmi and onboard audio. Also 10 drives might run hot inside that case, not that I have any idea what that edition stands for. Some German sites seems to have information, but I'm too sober to try my German.

The PCGH-Edition is missing the side-door and top fans, leaving only the front and back fans.
It does go contrary to your concerns regarding overheating, I will try to look-up other users' experience with this case.

Despite all the useless extras the Asrock board is a bit cheaper than the Supermicro.
Also I feel that using the internal graphics card of the i3 is a nice touch, but that is just my feeling.

 

[Richman]

My first build idea was a 6x 4TB.
I agree, compared with 10x 2TB it would fit a smaller case (especially that nice Node 304) and consume less energy.
However it has a slightly higher initial cost and can't really be expanded too much just by swapping out the disks.
In general, 'wasting' 1/3 of the disk space on parity... idk, it just seems too much.
Pretty though descision.
Thanks for the welcome btw :)

Curious, How many parity disks would you need for 10x2TB disks to have just on level of redundancy? I mean is there some point whre you have so many disks in a raid that you need two or doesn't it matter? I know this is an elementary question and one that seasoned RAID experts jsut know.

 

[indy]

The way I see it at some point one disk will simply fail without prior notice.
And if a second drive fails while ordering a replacement, or afterwards under the stress of rebuilding all data would be lost.
Since I will only backup personal data regularly that is something I would absolutely try to avoid.

 

[Richman]

No, what I meant was, does one disk do all parity regardless of how many disks in an array?

 

[Dusan]

No, what I meant was, does one disk do all parity regardless of how many disks in an array?

RAID5 & RAIDZ1 use one drive worth of parity by definition. However, there is no specific drive that holds the parity (RAID3 & RAID4 work that way), with RAID5 & RAIDZ1 the parity is distributed over all the disks. You may want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_levels

 

[Richman]

I already read that twice before but didn't answr the question of RAID 6,7,8,9 in terms of 'Dedicated parity. I am assuming that in a 24 disk RAID 5 that only one extra disk is needed for parity and in a 24 disk RAID 6, still only 2 extra disks are needed regardless of if it is dedicated or distributed or the number of disks in the mentioned array.

 

[Dusan]

I already read that twice before but didn't answr the question of RAID 6,7,8,9 in terms of 'Dedicated parity

There are no dedicated parity disks with RAID6/RAIDZ2/RAIDZ3. The parity is distributed across all the disks.

 

[cyberjock]

Richman: Let me introduce you to the FreeNAS manual, where your question was answered for you...

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#RAID_Overview

Now to go club a seal in your name!