BUILD First build - Mini-ITX on ASRock E3C224D2I

[aureo]

Hi everyone,

I'm building my first NAS ever and would appreciate some thoughts from some more experienced people.

The idea is to keep it small and simple, but with room to upgrade it if the need comes.
It will first have 5x 2TB (or 3TB, not sure yet) and serve as a fileserver (mostly not important data, and the important part will be cold backed up), media center (Plex) and torrent download (Transmission).

Motherboard: ASRock E3C224D2I (or her sister C226, depending on availability/price, ~$200)

The only Mini-ITX which have 6 SATA and support ECC, period. The PCI slot is a big plus, if I ever need to make it bigger.​

CPU: Pentium G3220 ($60)

I don't think I need any special; if you think I can save money here, I'd be happy to hear it.​

RAM: Kingston KVR16E11/4 ($60)

4GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC. I know 2 sticks are better than 1, but I don't want to have to buy 2 new sticks if I want to upgrade the RAM.​

PSU: Antec EA-380 ($60)

Not sure what I'm doing here... I would really appreciate some hindsight!​

Case: Lian Li PC-Q25 ($120)

It will lay in my living room, so I need something pretty enough.​

Even though I live in Japan, I converted in dollar for your reference, so the pricing may be a little different from US

Any thoughts are welcome, but here are some questions I still have:
1. Is everything compatible and FreeNAS-compliant?
2. Is it possible to improve the power consumption? (I'm guessing with another PSU, but I don't know how much watts I need and which brand is ok).
3. Can I save money on the CPU?
Thanks!
Aurélien

 

[cyberjock]

1. There's been many threads that Haswell isn't 100% compatible with FreeNAS/FreeBSD. It ranges from errors on bootup to not being able to bootup at all. So its your risk if you want to buy it.
2. That board maxes out at 16GB of RAM. You shouldn't be going with anything less than an 8GB stick to start. 8GB of RAM is the minimum for ZFS.
3. Not really.

 

[aureo]

Thanks cyberjock for your quick feedback.
You were right assuming I was going to go ZFS, I was thinking RAIDZ1.

1. Well, that's not a good news, I'll go check further. What would be your best-price advice (knowing I don't need a high-end CPU)?
2. You made a good point about ZFS; I'll listen to you and take a 8GB stick.

Also, if somebody could point me to a reliable, more-adapted-to-my-needs PSU, I'd be thankful.

Cheers!

 

[cyberjock]

Most people that don't plan to use Plex with transcoding will find that a system with a Supermicro X9SCM-F and g2020 with 2x8GB sticks of ECC RAM is a good start for a home server. Very low power consumption, Intel NIC, IPMI, etc. Basically all the stuff you want and none of the stuff you don't.

 

[gpsguy]

Since you're planning to go mini-itx, I'd buy a modular power supply. You'll be able to pick and choose the cables you actually need. Seasonic makes some nice units.

Also, if somebody could point me to a reliable, more-adapted-to-my-needs PSU

 

[jyavenard]

1. There's been many threads that Haswell isn't 100% compatible with FreeNAS/FreeBSD. It ranges from errors on bootup to not being able to bootup at all. So its your risk if you want to buy it.

Where if I may ask?

I've just ordered a haswell CPU (E3-1220V3), and I've read almost all posts in this forum on the matter, I haven't noticed anything specifically related to haswell not working.

I could understand a particular chipset not being properly supported. but a CPU ??

 

[cyberjock]

It's not really that the CPU isn't supported. It's that the new CPU functions, motherboard chipset and hardware aren't supported. Some of the new stuff causes kernel panics and other nasty things because the hardware is newer than FreeBSD 9.1 and the drivers that the system uses aren't designed for the new hardware. It just takes time for the drivers to be written and made available. There's a handful of threads that have new Haswell boards with USB3 and they have to disable USB3 to get the system to boot. For some boards it appears that if you disable USB3 then you really are disabling all USB on the system. So suddenly your FreeNAS USB stick isn't too useful. ;)

The new Intel Atoms are really enticing. They are very low power usage, support ECC RAM, are mini-itx and can do 32GB of RAM. There's just one drawback. The system won't boot FreeNAS without crashing mid-boot. It'll eventually be supported. But it could take 6 months to a year. It also could be never. It just depends on how much support the hardware vendor provides for FreeBSD. Intel is usually very good at supporting FreeBSD, so I'd expect 6 months to a year tops.

 

[enemy85]

It's not really that the CPU isn't supported. It's that the new CPU functions, motherboard chipset and hardware aren't supported. Some of the new stuff causes kernel panics and other nasty things because the hardware is newer than FreeBSD 9.1 and the drivers that the system uses aren't designed for the new hardware. It just takes time for the drivers to be written and made available. There's a handful of threads that have new Haswell boards with USB3 and they have to disable USB3 to get the system to boot. For some boards it appears that if you disable USB3 then you really are disabling all USB on the system. So suddenly your FreeNAS USB stick isn't too useful. ;)

so are you saying that the G3220 is not yet recommended because of the USB3? Even with a supermicro board?

 

[cyberjock]

so are you saying that the G3220 is not yet recommended because of the USB3? Even with a supermicro board?

It's not really that the CPU isn't supported. It's that the new CPU functions, motherboard chipset and hardware aren't supported. Some of the new stuff causes kernel panics and other nasty things because the hardware is newer than FreeBSD 9.1 and the drivers that the system uses aren't designed for the new hardware. It just takes time for the drivers to be written and made available. There's a handful of threads that have new Haswell boards with USB3 and they have to disable USB3 to get the system to boot. For some boards it appears that if you disable USB3 then you really are disabling all USB on the system. So suddenly your FreeNAS USB stick isn't too useful. ;)

^^^ Read that.

 

[jyavenard]

so are you saying that the G3220 is not yet recommended because of the USB3? Even with a supermicro board?

the G3220 doesn't do USB3, nor any USB for that matter... It's the chipset that controls that.

The chipsets supporting the G3220 and all the new intel E3-12xx V3 are very new, only a few months old

I haven't read threads about people with FreeBSD or FreeNAS having incompatibilities yet.
In this thread, this motherboard uses one of those new C222 chipset (which supports the G3220 and appears to be the price-conscious choice used in many servers)
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/supermicro-x10sl7-f.14105/
and there's no mention of incompatibilities per say so far...

I'll be able to test it myself when my motherboard finally arrives, unfortunately it had a 2 weeks lead time, and report then

I was googling FreeBSD and C222 to try and find any relevant incompatibilities, and I found this post... gave me a laugh:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=25005291&sid=001ae6301067f33f2f9ab5e9c93f565a#p25005291

 

[Dusan]

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/supermicro-x10sl7-f.14105/
and there's no mention of incompatibilities per say so far...

Actually, there is, for example here: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/supermicro-x10sl7-f.14105/page-2#post-77244 (FreeNAS would not boot, unless xHCI [USB3] is disabled).
See this for more information on the xHCI/USB3 issue: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3273#note-11

 

[jyavenard]

Actually, there is, for example here: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/supermicro-x10sl7-f.14105/page-2#post-77244 (FreeNAS would not boot, unless xHCI [USB3] is disabled).
See this for more information on the xHCI/USB3 issue: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3273#note-11

this bug seems to be more a FreeNAS 9 vs FreeNAS 8 bug rather than incorrect support of new chipset; as per the bug report, when using 8.1 there's no issue.

 

[Dusan]

FreeNAS 8 did not include the xhci kernel driver (or, to be precise, it did not load it on boot), FreeNAS 9 does. The issue is indeed about incorrect support of new hardware. As mentioned in the bug report, the driver works with some boards (H77 express chipset), but not with the new C22x chipset boards. Quoting Doug (iXsystems enginner): "When XHCI is enabled it takes over all of the USB ports and the current driver isn't working properly with the Lynx Point PCH, resulting in no devices being attached, even to USB 2.0 ports" (https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3273#note-11). On some boards you can disable xHCI in BIOS and the ports will fall back to USB2 allowing FreeNAS to boot. However, there are some USB3 only boards (for example Supermicro X9SBAA) where disabling USB3 makes all ports completely dead. There is currently no workaround to make FreeNAS boot on such motherboard. Please read the entire bug report, including the updates. It's all explained there.

 

[cyberjock]

this bug seems to be more a FreeNAS 9 vs FreeNAS 8 bug rather than incorrect support of new chipset; as per the bug report, when using 8.1 there's no issue.

Actually, it's that FreeNAS 8.x has the USB3(xhci) drivers disabled by default. And pre-FreeNAS 8.3 the drivers weren't even included with FreeNAS! The whole reason why it was disabled by default is because there were known problems back then. I enabled it and it worked great with my USB3 chip. Of course, USB3 doesn't affect bootup times or system performance, so its not really useful for FreeNAS to have USB3(more on that below). But there's PLENTY of other people that enabled it and couldn't get FreeNAS to boot after that. So not surprisingly, since 9.x has the drivers enabled by default a boatload of people have had USB3 problems.

If you read the bugs.freenas.org ticket on the whole USB3 issue, there's a ticket I created to have USB3 disabled by default. Unfortunately its more complicated than just disabling USB3 like we did in 8.x. Does it suck? Absolutely. Is there a fix? Not a simple one...

 

[jyavenard]

FreeNAS 8 did not include the xhci kernel driver

make sense...

so it's a USB3 issue then...

 

[Dusan]

so it's a USB3 issue then...

Yes, if your board supports both USB2 & USB3 then either both work (H77), or you can at least disable USB3 (C22x) and boot from USB2. However, if your new board only has USB3 that is not supported by the current xhci driver then FreeNAS will not boot (doesn't matter if it's FreeNAS 8 or 9). You could probably still install FreeNAS onto an HDD/SDD, but you would "lose" the entire drive & a SATA port...

 

[cyberjock]

make sense...

so it's a USB3 issue then...

It appears that way. I put in ticket https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3273 because USB3 doesn't affect bootup speeds and most people aren't using USB at all. If you are crazy enough to actually have a bunch of USB hard drives and performance drops if USB3 were to be disabled on the next release, well, you'll get what's coming. USB is not a reliable storage for a server.

Unfortunately, if you read that ticket you'll see that many boards are coming with USB3 only, so disabling USB3 is a bad thing. USB3 is supposed to allow you to fall back to ehci, but apparently that's not something we should rely on either. So the only "good" solution is to fix the driver for the affected hardware. Something tells me this is a bit more than trival to accomplish. Considering how broken USB3 is for these new boards I'm guessing that support hasn't been officially supported and its more of a hack-job.

I will freely admit that if I were building a system right now today I'd try to stick with the previous generation hardware. At least for now. I'm thinking that someone will come up with a solution, but whether that's tomorrow or next year is anyone's guess. Since many of the FreeNAS developers are also FreeBSD developers the issue is in good hands. But if the manufacturer of the hardware doesn't provide some good support it might never be fixed. :(

 

[jonnn]

With the supermicro Haswell board working on FreeNAS (per the other thread) what are the chances of getting this one running well?

I was considering avoton (the 12 port ASROCK board) but delays and still no pricing information is making me look at this one.

 

[Dusan]

With the supermicro Haswell board working on FreeNAS (per the other thread) what are the chances of getting this one running well?

It may work, but I don't think anybody will be able to 100% guarantee that until somebody takes the leap and tries it.

I was considering avoton (the 12 port ASROCK board) but delays and still no pricing information is making me look at this one.

So far, the ASRock Avoton board doesn't seem to be able to run FreeNAS: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/sths-take-on-the-new-avotons.15543/#post-79920. Patrick over at STH tried all the suggestions we had but so far no luck: http://forums.servethehome.com/proc...50-boards-12-sata-ports-ipmi-3.html#post23105

 

[enemy85]

So the answer i get from these replies is that because of new chipset for haswell cpu are not properly supported yet, is better to keep going with a 1155 configuration than a newer 1150, right?

This would have been a great solution...
http://www.wiredzone.com/Supermicro...d-Mini-ITX-w--Intel-Atom-C2758~10022937~0.htm