BUILD First FreeNAS - file and media storage

[stephb]

Hi,

This will be my first build and I've read all kinds of recommendation threads on the forums so I think I'm pretty good with the hardware selections I've made, but any feedback will be much appreciated. This will be used to store music, pictures, video, documents, etc. Video and audio streaming to my HTPC will happen, but no transcoding is required.

I tried to make this for as little $$$ as possible without sacrificing the must-haves. I'm planning on a Raidz2 build. Please review and let me know if I'm going to be good with this. Recommendations are always appreciated too.

Highlights:

• AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor
• Asus SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard
• Kingston ValueRAM 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1333MHz ECC CL9 DIMMs w/TS (KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G)
• 4 x WD Red 3TB 3.5" SATA3 64MB Buffer NAS OEM Hard Drive

Link: http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/2YTqN

One thing I'm curious about... With this MB It has 8 SATA6 ports, but 6 are controlled by one controller and 2 are controlled by another. If in the future I wanted to add another RZ2 of 4 drives would the fact that 2 would be on one controller and 2 would be on another matter?

 

[Yatti420]

I'm not sure about the motherboard / AMD.. Make sure the ram is the recommended / optimal.. I don't like the boards with split sata ports / controllers like that.. I have a board with an intel and jmicron controller..

 

[cyberjock]

All I'm going to say is "good luck". Too many AMD boards don't work with FreeBSD/FreeNAS. It's your money and your time if it doesn't work out.

It *shouldn't* matter so long as the controller plays well with FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

 

[DrKK]

I'm not sure how someone could be allegedly familiar with the stuff in the forums and then buy AMD stuff?

 

[stephb]

I've seen the Sabertooth board listed a couple times on this forum. As I said I'm open to suggestions. I've had no issue with AMD hardware in the other machines I run, but obviously if there's an issue specifically related to freenas then I'm all ears.

If I could get something Intel (mb and cpu) for about $350 that would support at least 4 drives and ECC. So if anyone has any suggestions... I'm all ears. :)

 

[DrKK]

No problem.

Supermicro X10-SLM+-F motherboard, and an Intel G3220 CPU. Total cost probably about $275.

 

[stephb]

Awesome. Thanks!

Is there a huge benefit to spending more on the CPU if it's just for data storage?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Awesome. Thanks!

Is there a huge benefit to spending more on the CPU if it's just for data storage?

Straight up data storage only, very little benefit. lz4 compression is fast enough even on the Pentium that your network will likely be the bottleneck unless you're running multiple NICs. Scrub performance would be the only "routine" usage it would see, and those would just take a smidgen longer.

If you decide to install plugins that eat CPU, eg: Plex transcoding, then you'll feel it. Unfortunately the "next step up" that officially supports ECC is a Xeon.

 

[DrKK]

Yeah, I run a G3220, X10 board, as I said, and I'm running a couple of jails doing light duty work. Mostly, I'm just serving files for movies and stuff. CPU never goes above 10%.

 

[cyberjock]

Straight up data storage only, very little benefit. lz4 compression is fast enough even on the Pentium that your network will likely be the bottleneck unless you're running multiple NICs. Scrub performance would be the only "routine" usage it would see, and those would just take a smidgen longer.

Yeah.. well, my test runs on my server with lz4 showed that I lost about 15% of my CIFS performance.. on a Xeon 1230v2. So I'm still not sold on this whole "lz4 is free compression" kool-id.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Yeah.. well, my test runs on my server with lz4 showed that I lost about 15% of my CIFS performance.. on a Xeon 1230v2. So I'm still not sold on this whole "lz4 is free compression" kool-id.

Depends on your dataset. I imagine you lost a lot more throughput when you tried lzjb even, and I don't think you want to talk about gzip.

I also never said "free" either, I said "fast enough." But now that I review that it's storing largely video, music, and photos - already compressed - there's no real value in adding ZFS compression on top of that, even with lz4's early-abort there's no value in going through even the first few iterations for just the documents.

 

[cyberjock]

Depends on your dataset. I imagine you lost a lot more throughput when you tried lzjb even, and I don't think you want to talk about gzip.

I didn't even try anything else. I know what the performance penalty would be, and I'd rather accept the 50 cents worth of disk space than 1/2(or less) in network performance.

I also never said "free" either, I said "fast enough." But now that I review that it's storing largely video, music, and photos - already compressed - there's no real value in adding ZFS compression on top of that, even with lz4's early-abort there's no value in going through even the first few iterations for just the documents.

Well, that's a double edged sword. Generally you don't copy 8GB word files either. The stuff that compresses well is generally not in large files, so you already suffer a penalty due to inefficiencies with small files. But my throughput of large files, even artificially created text files that are multi-GB are slower.