Current NAS is dying/dead, want to replace with FreeNAS

[rmccullough]

I have an old Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB NAS that I have been using for several years. However, it appears to be dying/dead. Rather than purchase another home user solution, I would like to build a FreeNAS server.

I have been looking at the FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide (updated 09/28/2016) and Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 1e) 2017-05-06 (updated 05/06/2017), however both of these resources are a bit dated.

Is there an updated hardware recommendation list available?

 

[danb35]

The hardware recommendations guide is really pretty up-to-date--there hasn't been a great lot happening in the server hardware space recently.

 

[Chris Moore]

Is there an updated hardware recommendation list available?

The hardware requirements for FreeNAS are about gear that is known to be completely supported and reliable. You could even step back a generation older than what is in the guide and still get a very good system for FreeNAS. It is not CPU intensive, but it does like a lot of RAM, depending on exactly what you want to do.
If you give us some insight on the things you want the NAS to be capable of doing for you, we could make some suggestions of value oriented components, or if you want to go high dollar, the organization I work for just put a contract out for a system that costs $40,000 ish. The important factor is to have the system scaled to match the requirement because you can easily over spend on components that provide no benefit, while missing the boat on the places where the investment should have been made.

 

[Arwen]

Well, AMD is releasing new, serious CPUs. But, there are few server boards out there with the new sockets, (SP3 & TR4). Even if we had more boards, AMD CPUs tend to be less well tested with FreeBSD / FreeNAS.

 

[Chris Moore]

Well, AMD is releasing new, serious CPUs. But, there are few server boards out there with the new sockets, (SP3 & TR4). Even if we had more boards, AMD CPUs tend to be less well tested with FreeBSB / FreeNAS.

We have had a couple of early adopters post about their results and FreeNAS mostly works, but the virtualization is not working properly.

 

[rmccullough]

Fair point.

I would like something with >=10TB of storage, with room to grow.

I would also like to replace an old laptop running ubuntu 16 I have in the crawl space which provides:

• Plex Server
• SSH Server
• VPN Server (I can't seem to get this working correctly in my pfSense firewall)
• Apache

Ideally it would be able to transcode live TV as well through Plex.

I am totally open to purchasing a piece of used hardware on eBay. I am looking for value here. Noise should not be too big of a concern as the machine will go in my crawlspace.

The hardware requirements for FreeNAS are about gear that is known to be completely supported and reliable. You could even step back a generation older than what is in the guide and still get a very good system for FreeNAS. It is not CPU intensive, but it does like a lot of RAM, depending on exactly what you want to do.
If you give us some insight on the things you want the NAS to be capable of doing for you, we could make some suggestions of value oriented components, or if you want to go high dollar, the organization I work for just put a contract out for a system that costs $40,000 ish. The important factor is to have the system scaled to match the requirement because you can easily over spend on components that provide no benefit, while missing the boat on the places where the investment should have been made.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 1e) 2017-05-06 (updated 05/06/2017), however both of these resources are a bit dated.

I have been putting off the update for a few reasons:

• Intel has stagnated even more than usual. All the lakes are basically the same.
• AMD is back, but the software isn't quite there yet.
• High-end Xeon has gotten a bit too high-end for many FreeNAS users. And I'm completely lost there (good work, Intel marketing, you've confused me).
  
• C3000 is expensive as hell, Xeon-D is confusing.
• Spectre, Metldown and company, kinda maybe waiting for hardware solutions (although much of the performance loss seems to have been mitigated).

The general guidelines are still as valid as they were when I wrote the original version. Some of the detailed hardware may have changed slightly, or more significantly in the high-end.

 

[rvassar]

• Plex Server
• SSH Server
• VPN Server (I can't seem to get this working correctly in my pfSense firewall)
• Apache

Ideally it would be able to transcode live TV as well through Plex.

Plex runs natively in a jail on FreeNAS. Though you'll likely find the version downrev from your Ubuntu. My FreeNAS 11.1u5 claims it's running 1.12.2.4929.

SSH is native to FreeNAS, but it is a modified FreeBSD OS, so you may not feel at home right away. I would not suggest exposing it to the Internet unless you have some expertise in hardening OpenSSH. Something along these lines:

https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html

You can however run your familiar Ubuntu in a VM, which will provide your familiar environment. I still recommend hardening SSH exposed to Internet traffic of course.

Apache should be easy to configure.

Transcoding live TV is not going to work. There will be no native device support, and no USB passthru to a VM. You'll need another device for that.

 

[rmccullough]

What is the general impression of something like this: 2u Supermcro 12 Bay X9DRI-LN4F 2x Xeon E5-2620 18TB FREENAS JBOD Storage Server

Does that represent a pretty good value?

 

[danb35]

Does that represent a pretty good value?

Overall, I'd say yes. There are a number of things that are sub-optimal, but I'd say the price makes up for them:

• The E5-2620 has a pretty slow clock, so things that are single-threaded (like Samba) will suffer a bit.
• You have a motherboard full of 4 GB DIMMs, with limited (if any) room for expansion without throwing out RAM you already have (edit: never mind, the board has 24 DIMM sockets, so there would be room for expansion)
  
• 2 TB disks aren't the best TB/$ value (new, at least)
• E5 CPUs and their associated boards aren't optimized for energy efficiency.

OTOH, there's a lot good about it:

• A proper server-grade motherboard with IPMI support
• Intel NIC chipsets
• Proper SAS HBAs (though you'll probably want to update them to the latest firmware)
• The SATA DOM makes a nice boot device
• Decent amount of ECC RAM--and more RAM is going to be relatively cheap compared to the current DDR4
• 12 bays will give you decent room for storage expansion

 

[Chris Moore]

What is the general impression of something like this: 2u Supermcro 12 Bay X9DRI-LN4F 2x Xeon E5-2620 18TB FREENAS JBOD Storage Server

Does that represent a pretty good value?

I bet those drives have a lot of hours on them and you may end up needing to replace them within a fairly short amount of time. It might be a good starter system though.
As for the 2GHz CPUs, you will probably want to change those out for higher clock speed, but that is not horribly expensive.
You could get a pair of these for just about $114, for example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-e5-2630-v2-2-6Ghz-15MB-LGA-2011-CPU-PROCESSOR-SR1AM/132745783244

 

[rmccullough]

danb35, exactly. There are some things about it that are not great. The drives are relatively small, the processor underwhelming, and I will need to add ram. Thankfully, adding ram is pretty easy, and as Chris Moore points out I can update the processor relatively cheap. It sounds like you both agree that the price represents a good value right now.

My thinking is that this gets me started, with the advantages you mentioned. I can get FreeNAS installed on this and it at least gets my NAS back up. Then I can slowly look at upgrading.

A couple of questions I have though:

1. Can this chassis take a newer motherboard, like an X10 or X11 architecture? If so, it may be worth me buying this to get started and then upgrade the motherboard later. If so, would it even be worth upgrading the processors & ram now? I figure my timeframe is in the next 6-12 months.
2. As for upgrading the drives, what is the best way to phase out old drives? Is there a clear path to migrate data? It would really help if there was a wiki page, guide, or walkthrough on how to do this.

Anything else I am missing? Would I need any additional hardware?

Overall, I'd say yes. There are a number of things that are sub-optimal, but I'd say the price makes up for them:

• The E5-2620 has a pretty slow clock, so things that are single-threaded (like Samba) will suffer a bit.
• You have a motherboard full of 4 GB DIMMs, with limited (if any) room for expansion without throwing out RAM you already have (edit: never mind, the board has 24 DIMM sockets, so there would be room for expansion)
  
• 2 TB disks aren't the best TB/$ value (new, at least)
• E5 CPUs and their associated boards aren't optimized for energy efficiency.

OTOH, there's a lot good about it:

• A proper server-grade motherboard with IPMI support
• Intel NIC chipsets
• Proper SAS HBAs (though you'll probably want to update them to the latest firmware)
• The SATA DOM makes a nice boot device
• Decent amount of ECC RAM--and more RAM is going to be relatively cheap compared to the current DDR4
• 12 bays will give you decent room for storage expansion

I hear you on the wear of those drives and the speed of the processor. See comment above though and let me know if this is a reasonable approach.

I bet those drives have a lot of hours on them and you may end up needing to replace them within a fairly short amount of time. It might be a good starter system though.
As for the 2GHz CPUs, you will probably want to change those out for higher clock speed, but that is not horribly expensive.
You could get a pair of these for just about $114, for example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-e5-2630-v2-2-6Ghz-15MB-LGA-2011-CPU-PROCESSOR-SR1AM/132745783244

 

[danb35]

Can this chassis take a newer motherboard, like an X10 or X11 architecture?

Sure it can.

As for upgrading the drives, what is the best way to phase out old drives?

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool

 

[Chris Moore]

In this chassis, if you initially create a pool of two vdevs (six drives in each) you will not be able to add an additional disk as the documentation suggests. You will need to remove a disk, install the replacement, then start the resilver. The pool capacity expands when all the drives in a vdev have been replaced by larger drives.
If you are running the pool in RAIDz2, then you will still have some redundancy when you are replacing a drive. The recommendation would be to use RAIDz2 any time the drives are larger than 1 TB.
I usually plan drives to be replaced once they get to the five year mark, but the HGST drives have a good history of long service. If you have a need for more capacity, you could begin swap out of the drives as funding permits. If you don't have a pressure for more space, you can watch the drive health and replace drives as they fail. I would suggest that you have a couple of spare drives ready because I have had to replace multiple in a single month when my drives were all over five years old. I just went through the process of buying a whole new set of drives for my system between June of 2017 and March of this year. I bought a whole lot of drives.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[danb35]

...and just to be somewhat contrary...

I know there are some here (Chris is one; I think @joeschmuck is another) who believe in preemptive disk replacement once they reach a certain age. I don't. FreeNAS has good disk-monitoring tools built in, so I use them, and replace disks once (and as soon as) they give me a reason to (typically that would be bad sectors coming up in SMART data).

I'm inclined to agree with the suggestion of six-disk RAIDZ2 vdevs in that chassis, though, as it seems a natural fit for twelve bays. Another option would be a single eight-disk RAIDZ2 vdev--it would give you 50% more capacity, and it would leave bays available for the disk replacement technique described in the manual. However, it leaves four bays empty most of the time.

 

[Chris Moore]

who believe in preemptive disk replacement once they reach a certain age. I don't.

It wasn't just because they got to the age, because I usually wait for the drive to fail also. I have two FreeNAS systems at home with (at the time) 24 drives between them and all the drives were either close to or passed the five years point. I was having a drive or two fail every month and I had two in one day one time. It was getting to be a pain. The other factor at the time was that I wanted more space. So, between the two pressures, I initially replaced one vdev (six drives in my vdevs) with the same sized drives I was already using because those were the oldest and I did a little shuffling of drives. For me it wasn't perfectly straight forward because I have been ruining these systems for years and only replacing drives as they failed so they were not all the same age. This time I was in a little different situation and the other three vdevs got 4 TB drives to expand capacity. It was mainly because I was lucky to come into a really good deal on a quantity of drives at well below retail:


I am still contemplating whether or not to replace the vdev of almost new 2 TB drives that I already put in before I got these 4 TB drives. I normally maintain two or three spares of each drive size that I am using.

 

[Ericloewe]

It wasn't just because they got to the age. I have two FreeNAS systems at home with (at the time) a 24 drives between them and all the drives were over five years old. I was having a drive or two fail every month and I had two in one day one time. It was getting to be a pain. The other factor at the time was that I wanted more space. So, between the two pressures, I initially replaced one vdev (six drives in my vdevs) with the same sized drives I was already using because those were the oldest and I did a little shuffling of drives. For me it wasn't perfectly straight forward because I have been ruining these systems for years and only replacing drives as they failed. This time I was in a little different situation and the other three vdevs got 4 TB drives to expand capacity. It was mainly because I was lucky to come into a really good deal on a quantity of drives at well below retail:
View attachment 25201

Sounds sensible. That many failures do suggest a need for replacement.

 

[rvassar]

...and just to be somewhat contrary...

I know there are some here (Chris is one; I think @joeschmuck is another) who believe in preemptive disk replacement once they reach a certain age. I don't.

It isn't really a personal preference / bias kind of decision. You need to match your replacement strategy to your requirements. In a multiple-redundant RAIDz2, with hot-spare or nearby cold-spare, and insignificant IOPS requirement that is satisfied by a degraded pool, that is entirely reasonable. In a higher performance application, where the IOPS requirement is only met by the round-robin access of mirror halves, stripes, etc... That may require a hot-spare and priority managed re-silvering to maintain application SLA.

 

[Chris Moore]

In a higher performance application, where the IOPS requirement is only met by the round-robin access of mirror halves, stripes, etc... That may require a hot-spare and priority managed re-silvering to maintain application SLA.

I don't have a high performance requirement at home, but I am paranoid about loosing data and I would rather replace a drive than worry that a drive fault would damage the data. I do it for my peace of mind. Same reason I have a full backup NAS. If something happened where the primary was down, I can just point at the backup for any files I need because I store everything on the NAS.

 

[rmccullough]

A little more "gravy" on that auction I mentioned above, they are offering a 1 year warranty. I asked if it is legit and covers drives:

This one comes with 1 Year Warranty we have a spare drive there for you in case one fails, on top of that we will replace any failed drives within the 1 year warranty

I think I am going to pull the trigger with the intent to upgrade the drives and guts over the next 1-2 years.