FreeNAS Performance on ASRock 350M1

[SundayNinja]

Hello,

I am planning to setup my own NAS for home entertainment. I choose the following parts:

- ASRock 350M1 (CPU: AMD E-350, 2x 1.6 Ghz, 2x 512kb Cache) with Gigabyte Ethernet
- 16 GB G.Skill Ares DDR3-1866 DIMM CL1 Dual (the Mobo will reduce frequency to 1033 MHz)
- 2x 3TB Seagate NAS HDD ST3000VN000

The reason I chose this Mobo because I am really concerned about power consumption. But now I am curious to know whether this setup is enough to do the following:

1. Run FreeNAS efficiently on a home network containing 6 iOS devices and a 46 inch TV, and three Windows laptops.

2. Arrange my HDDs in RAID-1 using FreeNAS own filesystem (I think it is called ZFS) efficiently. Please note that my Mobo does not have a RAID controller therefor I must use FreeNAS to do the job.

3. Will I be able to do video transcoding? e.g. use FreeNAS to stream XVid to my iPad.

4. The Mobo has one PCIe 2.0 socket, in future I may install a RAID-controller, will it be supported by FreeNAS?

I am still a beginner to FreeNAS and currently learning it so please excuse my ignorance! Any help/advice is extremely appreciated!

Cheers

 

[danb35]

Unless that motherboard/processor support ECC RAM, you're taking a big risk with your data under ZFS--ECC RAM is strongly recommended. If anything, if you're cash-strapped, I might suggest reducing the RAM to 8 GB to free up some money to buy a system that will support ECC. Have you already bought this board and RAM, or are you still looking? As to your other questions...

1. How do you see (if at all) your iOS devices and your TV interacting with the NAS? Natively, I wouldn't expect them to.

2. ZFS doesn't like RAID controllers; it prefers direct access to the drives and handles any necessary RAID operations itself. With the exception of ECC, your proposed system should be entirely adequate to support two mirrored 3 TB drives.

3. The preferred way of handling media transcoding seems to be the Plex Media Server. This is available for free as a plug-in for FreeNAS, but the iOS app costs $5. It is pretty RAM-hungry, in my experience. I'm not sure if the E350 has enough power to support this--perhaps someone else can chime in. The specs look kind of weak, but I don't have any experience with that chip.

4. The recommendation that seems to come up most frequently here for a drive controller is the IBM M1015, which you can find on eBay for around $100, with its firmware reflashed to remove the RAID capabilities. That would give you 8 more ports.

If you haven't bought the hardware yet, I'd seriously consider a different board and CPU. If power consumption is of critical importance, some of the newer Intel Atom CPUs are very powerful with low consumption. Transcoding video, particularly HD video, is very CPU-intensive. One board that looks like it would do very well is the ASRock C2750D4I. It's considerably more expensive than the AMD board, but it has several desirable features: (1) it supports--indeed, requires--ECC RAM; (2) it has 12 SATA ports onboard; (3) dual Intel gigabit LAN ports (Realtek, as present on the 350M1 board, has been known to perform poorly); (4) IPMI, which lets you administer your server remotely over the network--you never need a keyboard and monitor for it. I believe this is the same board that iXSystems uses in the FreeNAS Mini, though I'm not positive of that. Another option with a bit slower CPU would be http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419, which otherwise is very similar.

If your budget precludes one of these boards, there are other options, but you really want to stick with server-grade hardware for FreeNAS.

 

[Ericloewe]

Do not proceed any further before you've read and understood Cyberjock's Guide.

One board that looks like it would do very well is the ASRock C2750D4I. . I believe this is the same board that iXSystems uses in the FreeNAS Mini, though I'm not positive of that.

That's the one, according to Cyberjock's review.

 

[SundayNinja]

Thanks a lot for your responses, I did not buy the parts yet, which is good!

I did take a quick look at Cyberjock's Guide and learned that ECC is very important. Somehow I am a bit disappointed to know that ZFS will be a single point of failure if I use it with non-ECC RAM.

To be honest I find all ECC-Supporting Motherboards very expensive, however I would like to mitigate the risk of losing critical data.

The ASRock C2750D4I looks impressive but unfortunately very pricy, however the slightly slower C2550D4I is definitely better. So let's assume I changed my setup to the following:

- ASRock C2550D4I
- 8 GB Kingston ECC DDR3 1600MHz
- 2x 3TB Seagate NAS HDD ST3000VN000

I will refactor my questions to the following:

1. Can I Run FreeNAS efficiently on a home network containing 6 iOS devices and a 46 inch TV, and three Windows laptops (video transcoding, iTunes server, ...).

2. With 8 GB RAM, will ZFS be fast enough to manage RAID configuration comparing to HW RAID controller? How reliable will it be considering that I use ECC technology?

Again, thanks a lot for your advices. I really appreciate it.

 

[cyberjock]

1. Depends on how much CPU loading you will need. In theory you could do 20+ devices as long as they aren't expecting much. If you think you're going to go with plex transcoding to 6 iOS devices and your TV, you are in for a surprise as it definitely won't do that.

2. HW RAID isn't an option.. at all. Not sure why you are even trying to compare them. RAM directly affects ZFS performance. If your system starts performing too slow that is often your queue for more RAM. THere's no hard fast foolproof rule except to add more when its slow. Some people will need 32GB of RAM for a pool of your size, others will need 8GB. You can start with 8GB, but you may need to factor in another stick. That's on you to decide if/when the server starts performing slowly. 8GB is a good start, but 16GB is much better.

 

[jkh]

I did take a quick look at Cyberjock's Guide and learned that ECC is very important. Somehow I am a bit disappointed to know that ZFS will be a single point of failure if I use it with non-ECC RAM.

I just want to clear up what seems to be a frequent misconception here.

People basically use ZFS if and when they want *extreme* reliability. You can certainly use other filesystems which do not checksum the data to/from the disk (or, as ZFS does, checksum even the checksums) and those filesystems, furthermore, will not really benefit from using ECC memory because they're already relying on the disks to never corrupt information and essentially be 100% reliable so, to use an analogy, ECC memory would be like putting a lock on a screen door - why bother? Your data is already far more at risk by using a filesystem which was not designed to ensure that your data is not being corrupted by physical limitations of the media.

So, it's not that ZFS is somehow so uniquely fragile that it needs ECC. It's more the case that, to continue our analogy, if you're going to pay for a bank vault then you should also probably put it in a strong room made of concrete and stick some alarms in that room just in case you're visited by the sorts of thieves who go after bank vaults. ZFS can ensure that the data on disk is valid, but it cannot deal with corruption that occurs in-flight, through the RAM, so your "concrete room" is the ECC RAM to close that last loophole.

 

[toadman]

Good analogy by jkh.

If the intended server usage is media server exclusively, I would submit that ZFS is overkill. Assuming backups will exist, who cares if a bit gets flipped in a movie file, or if one loses the whole directory/file. i.e. I wouldn't think data integrity would be high on the priority list for that usage. Alternative NAS software using some other file system (even a simple linux CIFS share) would consume far fewer resources and may be faster too.

Really depends on the role of the server. It wasn't clear how the 6 iOS devices, TV, and laptops would be interacting with the server.

 

[SundayNinja]

Thanks for replies, they made me more informed and helped me indeed choosing a reliable, server-grade HW for my NAS.

I finally choose the following parts, they costed my quite a fortune but it is fine considering their reliability and low power consumption:
- Supermicro A1SAM-2550F equipped with quad core Intel C2550 Atom processor consuming as less as 14 Watt
- 2x Kingston KVR16E11/8 8Gb 1600MHz, 240 PIN, ECC DDR3 RAM
- 2x 3TB Seagate NAS HDD ST3000VN000 SATA III 64 MB Cache
- Seasonic G-360, 360 Watt 80+ Gold PSU
- 4 GB SanDisk Curzer USB 2.0 Flash drive

I am intending to use the server for the next five years mainly to archive and encrypt private data (important documents, family photos, ... etc) which is the driving reason behind changing to ECC technology, and to stream multimedia content to my home network. This may include transcoding video to iOS devices, exposing iTunes server. I also want to use it for rotating backups of my computers. To be honest I do not have an exact use case of multimedia streaming, but I want to be able to watch downloaded movies on any device and to be able to move my large iTunes library laying on my laptop to a central location where I will be able to synchronise my podcasts/mp3s/ ... on any of my iOS devices more easily, hopefully I will find some work around as well for iCloud integration with FreeNAS, mainly the photo stream.

Let's see how it goes with installing FreeNAS and setting it up during the next two weeks.

Again guys, thanks for putting me on the right direction,
Cheers :)