My journey started about 3 years ago in 2016. I had a WD PR4100 running Plex and it was super slow to transfer files to and had issues streaming more than 2 movies at a time. I had heard about FreeNAS so I took a really old AMD phantom II and am3+ motherboard and some old hard drives I had laying around and started playing with it. 11.1 was still in beta so I started off with 9 which worked quite well. “Once I had things figured out.” But the read and write speeds were a little slow for my liking but faster than the My Cloud. I had also heard about Unraid so went to try to install that and no matter what I did I couldn’t get it up and running. I also knew I would have to pay for it after I reached a certain amount of drives. So I decided to stick with FreeNAS.
In 2017 right before I finished my testing 11.1 stable was released so I did some testing with that and decided to move forward with that build. Next came the decision to either stick with really old hardware or to get a rack server because I already had acquired a 42U rack (wife almost killed me when I came home with it). I came across a HP ProLiant DL360 G7 8-bay server with 2 6 core Xeon’s and 64gigs of ram for a really good price that I just couldn’t pass up. I pulled the trigger on that and decided that for the speeds I wanted to transfer things at I should put 2tb SSD’s in this unit. (Yes I know overkill). I also picked up an Intel x540t2 10gig NIC. I started off with 4 drives in a raidz setup. And I held onto the WD PR4100 for a bit and used it for a back up of the FreeNAS unit. Quickly I realized 4 Micron 1100 ssd’s wouldn’t last the year. I picked up 4 more thought about just adding them to the pool to basically make a raidZ2 but realized I needed the space more so I rebuilt the Pool. Thing made me realize how important it was to plan ahead.
In the fall of 2018 after running into issues with the WD My Cloud not reporting a bad drive I decided it was time to build a secondary FreeNAS box that would house only Spinning rust drives that I could do nightly backup’s to. I picked up a Rosewill 4U case that came with 12 hot swap bays. Should have looked around more and gone with a Norco RPC-4220 case it’s about the same price. I had recently upgraded my dad’s tower so I had an AMD fx8350 and ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH 990FX laying around so in went that and now 8 4tb wd red drives. I also picked up a LSI SAS9201-8i card. I ran these 2 servers until the spring of 2019.
That spring after looking at the usage data I realized I should just combine these into 1 server. Needed the cores of the xeon’s but I also needed at least 8 2.5” bays for the ssd’s in a hot swap. So I found a 12x2.5 hot swap 3x5.25 cage to put in the Rosewill case. I went with a Supermicro X8DTH-6F dual LGA1366, (2) Xeon x5690, 192 gigs of ddr3 ecc ram, LSI9201-16i, and 4 more ssd’s.
This ran great struggled a little when I was editing video and Plex was transcoding 1080p to SD/720 when I had 4 people hitting the server at the same time from outside the house but never really slowed down noticeably. Found a bad cable in one of the SAS to SATA breakout cables went to replace that cable and replace the battery on the board because anytime the power was disconnected it would try to boot from a hard drive and not the flash drives. And the board wouldn’t start up. I spent 3 hours trying to figure it out. All I had was a blinking BMC light. And it wouldn’t start up at all. (We’ll get back to my stupidity in a bit)
I decided that maybe it was time to make one finally upgrade because I was adding a LSI9201-16e to the server so I could just add disk shelf’s when I wanted to add more storage. (I'm a bad data hoarder). So being tired and frustrated with the server (up too early for kid’s football games). I drove the hour and ten to microcenter and picked up a 2920X, Gigabyte x399 Aorus pro atx and 128 gigs of GSKILL AEGIS DDR4 3000 ram. Unfortunately they didn’t have an air cooler so I did up having to order one from Amazon will be in Tuesday 10/22. I got home and started taking everything apart moving stand off’s to where they needed to be for the new motherboard and taking picks of all the parts I know was working perfectly to sell to try and recoup some money from the new parts I had bought. I looked at the motherboard carefully thinking maybe it was a capacitor or something that finally went. And I was going to try and just replace that to get it working again to sell. I then noticed the pins for the power switch, restart, and stuff had a label next to them. I remember looking the manual super carefully and the manual had it numbered 1 to 20 bottom to top. I thought that was weird but most motherboards are. Well the label on the board its self showed it numbered 1 to 20 top to bottom. So at 10pm Sunday night not being able to just let things go I plugged the board into a known good power supply put the CPU’s back in and put the coolers back on with a stick of ram in each. I then waited for the BMC light to turn on and low and behold after a second or two I was able to short the pins that were labeled power switch and it turned on and went to the bios no problem. After some back and forth I decided to continue forward with the Threadripper figuring that using a processor on a 14nm with a lot more cache with higher clock speeds is worth the upgrade.
Things learned:
Always look at the motherboard carefully when building it may be different than the manual
Never jump the gun to replace something just because you’re tired and frustrated. It could be something stupid
Never bring a 5 year old to Microcenter you’ll want to rip your hair out. Lol.
If all goes well I’ll be able to update this on Wednesday letting you know how the new Threadripper is doing with FreeNAS, Plex, and the VM’s I have in FreeNAS.
In 2017 right before I finished my testing 11.1 stable was released so I did some testing with that and decided to move forward with that build. Next came the decision to either stick with really old hardware or to get a rack server because I already had acquired a 42U rack (wife almost killed me when I came home with it). I came across a HP ProLiant DL360 G7 8-bay server with 2 6 core Xeon’s and 64gigs of ram for a really good price that I just couldn’t pass up. I pulled the trigger on that and decided that for the speeds I wanted to transfer things at I should put 2tb SSD’s in this unit. (Yes I know overkill). I also picked up an Intel x540t2 10gig NIC. I started off with 4 drives in a raidz setup. And I held onto the WD PR4100 for a bit and used it for a back up of the FreeNAS unit. Quickly I realized 4 Micron 1100 ssd’s wouldn’t last the year. I picked up 4 more thought about just adding them to the pool to basically make a raidZ2 but realized I needed the space more so I rebuilt the Pool. Thing made me realize how important it was to plan ahead.
In the fall of 2018 after running into issues with the WD My Cloud not reporting a bad drive I decided it was time to build a secondary FreeNAS box that would house only Spinning rust drives that I could do nightly backup’s to. I picked up a Rosewill 4U case that came with 12 hot swap bays. Should have looked around more and gone with a Norco RPC-4220 case it’s about the same price. I had recently upgraded my dad’s tower so I had an AMD fx8350 and ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH 990FX laying around so in went that and now 8 4tb wd red drives. I also picked up a LSI SAS9201-8i card. I ran these 2 servers until the spring of 2019.
That spring after looking at the usage data I realized I should just combine these into 1 server. Needed the cores of the xeon’s but I also needed at least 8 2.5” bays for the ssd’s in a hot swap. So I found a 12x2.5 hot swap 3x5.25 cage to put in the Rosewill case. I went with a Supermicro X8DTH-6F dual LGA1366, (2) Xeon x5690, 192 gigs of ddr3 ecc ram, LSI9201-16i, and 4 more ssd’s.
This ran great struggled a little when I was editing video and Plex was transcoding 1080p to SD/720 when I had 4 people hitting the server at the same time from outside the house but never really slowed down noticeably. Found a bad cable in one of the SAS to SATA breakout cables went to replace that cable and replace the battery on the board because anytime the power was disconnected it would try to boot from a hard drive and not the flash drives. And the board wouldn’t start up. I spent 3 hours trying to figure it out. All I had was a blinking BMC light. And it wouldn’t start up at all. (We’ll get back to my stupidity in a bit)
I decided that maybe it was time to make one finally upgrade because I was adding a LSI9201-16e to the server so I could just add disk shelf’s when I wanted to add more storage. (I'm a bad data hoarder). So being tired and frustrated with the server (up too early for kid’s football games). I drove the hour and ten to microcenter and picked up a 2920X, Gigabyte x399 Aorus pro atx and 128 gigs of GSKILL AEGIS DDR4 3000 ram. Unfortunately they didn’t have an air cooler so I did up having to order one from Amazon will be in Tuesday 10/22. I got home and started taking everything apart moving stand off’s to where they needed to be for the new motherboard and taking picks of all the parts I know was working perfectly to sell to try and recoup some money from the new parts I had bought. I looked at the motherboard carefully thinking maybe it was a capacitor or something that finally went. And I was going to try and just replace that to get it working again to sell. I then noticed the pins for the power switch, restart, and stuff had a label next to them. I remember looking the manual super carefully and the manual had it numbered 1 to 20 bottom to top. I thought that was weird but most motherboards are. Well the label on the board its self showed it numbered 1 to 20 top to bottom. So at 10pm Sunday night not being able to just let things go I plugged the board into a known good power supply put the CPU’s back in and put the coolers back on with a stick of ram in each. I then waited for the BMC light to turn on and low and behold after a second or two I was able to short the pins that were labeled power switch and it turned on and went to the bios no problem. After some back and forth I decided to continue forward with the Threadripper figuring that using a processor on a 14nm with a lot more cache with higher clock speeds is worth the upgrade.
Things learned:
Always look at the motherboard carefully when building it may be different than the manual
Never jump the gun to replace something just because you’re tired and frustrated. It could be something stupid
Never bring a 5 year old to Microcenter you’ll want to rip your hair out. Lol.
If all goes well I’ll be able to update this on Wednesday letting you know how the new Threadripper is doing with FreeNAS, Plex, and the VM’s I have in FreeNAS.
