First serious home/work FreeNAS box build

[austin janey]

So I have a FeeNAS build thats been up for a bit composed of mostly junk parts (literally a mixed batch of drives and a asus mobo with missing vrm heat sinks lol) it was just an experiment its currently got some data on it just for giggles. Now that I more or less have a proof of concept I'm looking to actually build something more serious this is what I have planned after some thought.

I will be building in a ft02 (i like the case and its on my desk and i have to look at it i know its not a designated NAS style case but to each their own)

Power supply
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00607JL5C/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

ECC Ram 32gb (unsure if this will work with the motherboard I’m getting)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008LMO1DG/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Motherboard
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00906DHLE/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

CPU
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009O7YU56/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

CPU Cooler
http://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-U14S-Sockets-Heatpipe-Cooling/dp/B00C9FLSLY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1406241910&sr=1-1&keywords=noctua+s14

This is where I need some advice as you likely have noticed I have not yet selected drives. I would like to do a 5 drive array and I'm looking for 3-4tb drives at the moment although I haven't heard much about the reliability of 6tb drives and that interests me quite a bit.

I am also uncertain about how FreeNAS will run on that motherboard and cpu combo and if the ram I have selected is compatible.

Any and all input is welcome I think iv made this thread in the right category although my apologies if it needs to be moved.

I am planning on putting an intel NIC in the build.

So am I off to a good start?

 

[Yatti420]

Do a 6 drive raid z2.. motherboard doesn't support ECC (It's a gaming board it - doesn't usually aka don't buy these for a NAS). You want a server board... 1050 watt PSU is way overkill!..

Look at what I run.. You can save money and purchase more key components like a UPS..

My box is a blackbox which doesn't have full support for 6 drives.. I bracket in 5.25 bays.. Runs a few drives a little hot but good fans vent well.. A lot of redundancy with a z2 pool.. That being said a better case for me would allow me to expand or upgrade with the the proper parts.. Nothing wasted etc I pull about 60w.. Haven't checked it inawhile..

Edit#2 looking at your case it looks like it wont ventilate drives well.. A standard blackbox beigebox with forward facing fans would probably be better.. Espescially if you want to do a z2 versus z1 (i'd do z2 if your gonna put critical data on it)

 

[austin janey]

is their any benefit other than redundancy i get with z2?

I am 100% aware the PSU is overkill the reason it was chosen is because its one of seasonics hybrids that the fan in wont spin up until it reaches above 50% load. Thats what im going for so im sticking to my guns on that not to mention you can never go overkill with quality psu ;)

the motherboard says it supports ECC ram that's actually why I chose that board and iv had really good experience with asus rog boards before (I normally build liquid cooled gaming pcs) I was more specifically interested in if anybody had a serious production server on an amd platform and how it had been serving them.

as far as hard drive cooling goes it looks like that's something silverstone accounted for (there is a 180mm air penetrator directly against the bottom of the hard drive cage, although i may have to use a dremel to make sure that it gets airflow but that's easy enough. I may re-purpose some other drive cages later and make them internal ones. icy dock has some that might work)

any drive suggestions? I was looking at the seagate nas drives a little bit is that a bad idea?

most of the data here is not going to be anything thats super mission critical its mostly to store copies of virtual machines for testing purposes as well as a vast collection of ISO files and what not.

 

[cyberjock]

I am 100% aware the PSU is overkill the reason it was chosen is because its one of seasonics hybrids that the fan in wont spin up until it reaches above 50% load. Thats what im going for so im sticking to my guns on that not to mention you can never go overkill with quality psu ;)

Actually, you can. You should never, under any circumstances, run a PSU at <5% of rated load. Very bad for it.

 

[austin janey]

Actually, you can. You should never, under any circumstances, run a PSU at <5% of rated load. Very bad for it.

Interesting, where did you find that? I may back down to a 660watt that I trust I just don't want to be stuck if 6 months from now I decide to just go buy a synology to shove the drives in and turn this into a vdi server with ssd raid and gtx titan.

 

[Yatti420]

My mistake I didn't see that it supports ECC /Non-ECC.. I would still use a server board versus a gaming setup..

 

[austin janey]

My mistake I didn't see that it supports ECC /Non-ECC.. I would still use a server board versus a gaming setup..

Do you happen to know of a good amd server board? I looked for a bit but came to the conclusion that the ones that existed were not commonplace and or had worse overall ratings from builders that's why the rog board looked appealing, also it looks like evga has a trustworthy 750watt psu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438017

So I think I will go with that (even though that's still overkill for what i need most likely).

 

[cyberjock]

Interesting, where did you find that?

1. Electronics wizard from a previous life. Did 8 years of the stuff. Also if you read tech manuals on switching power supplies they say never go <5%. ;)
2. You can also see validation of this if you look at the actual 80+ validation testing, they only do 5% to 95%.
3. Read up on the latest Haswell CPU + some PSU fiasco. That's related to this.

 

[austin janey]

ok cool, ya iv heard that some older power supply's don't play well with haswells lower power states.

 

[danb35]

For the price of the motherboard/CPU you spec, you could be looking at a SuperMicro server-grade board and Xeon processor. See, for example, the SuperMicro X10SLL-F-O and the Xeon E3-1230V3. These are known to have better compatibility than most AMD gear. Is there a particular reason you want to use AMD?

 

[austin janey]

I was mainly looking at the amd parts because I saw that they had ecc support and iv always trusted asus for boards. super micro is a brand im unfamiliar with and based on the reviews on newegg and amazon it seems the be kind of hit and miss which concerns me a little bit.

 

[Ericloewe]

I was mainly looking at the amd parts because I saw that they had ecc support and iv always trusted asus for boards. super micro is a brand im unfamiliar with and based on the reviews on newegg and amazon it seems the be kind of hit and miss which concerns me a little bit.

Amazon reviews are mostly useless.

AMD is close to being "known-bad" with FreeNAS. The majority of regulars here have Supermicro X9 or X10 motherboards with Intel processors.

The PSU is overkill - An SS-660 Platinum would be a lot better, capacity-wise, and should be around the same price, if not lower.

Kingston memory is to be avoided at all costs, since they've been messing around with it, causing major compatibility problems.

A huge tower cooler is serious overkill.

 

[austin janey]

what memory brand do you recommend? Im looking at more supermicro boards I want something that's full atx what do you think of this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182830

 

[Z300M]

Why full ATX? Do you need all those PCIe slots? What would you use them for? Stay away from Kingston RAM: use the Supermicro-recommended modules.

 

[austin janey]

i prefer to have the option to expand im thinking about doing a virtual box install in a jail and running something like pf sence and using this machine partially as a firewall/router. Also the option to do something with a raid card later sounds like it could be a good idea if I ever move away from freenas as a platform to a different platform.

 

[Yatti420]

You plan to run pfsense within freenas? If you could find an x9 like I have I don't think you will be disappointed.. 32gb max I believe though.

Sent from my SGH-I257M using Tapatalk 2

 

[diedrichg]

Please note that you will want to have the same sized drives for your build. If you don't, FreeNAS will set your storage based on the smallest drive in the array. e.g. 4TB,4TB,4TB,1TB will actually show up with the usable space of 1TB,1TB,1TB,1TB!

 

[diedrichg]

Just an FYI, Cyberjock has a thread on here about pfsense and his parts build for that hardware bundle. It sounds like an interesting project.

 

[biGdada]

Just an FYI, Cyberjock has a thread on here about pfsense and his parts build for that hardware bundle. It sounds like an interesting project.

are you sure it's even possible to run pfsence in a Jail or I misundestood you?

 

[diedrichg]

I was referring to a hardware build for a standalone pfsense box that he built. I am not sure about pfsense in a jail.