Hard Drive & CPU Help & Motherboard Suggestions

[Christopher Ward]

Before I switch over to FreeNAS I'm wondering if anyone can help me. I currently already have a serrver that uses a raid controller but all my data is currupt by the looks of it. So i'll be selling the raid controller to finance a new media server.

I currently have 8x3tb WD Drives that i would like to move over and put as a RAIDZ2 from my old raid card but I also have 4 other drives (3x2tb and 1x1tb) that are mixed between samsung and western digital.

1. My question is for the the other 4 drives can i put them together and use them as a volume because I know with hardware raid you have to use the same capacity of drives and same company so I'm not sure how it works with FreeNAS.

2. Is it possible to not use any raid structure on them and just use the 7tb in total and if so what option would I chose under the volume layout.

3. if I was to buy more drives in the future can I expand the size of the RAIDZ2 volume without deleting all the data on it?

4. I will be getting ECC ram and I noticed the intel G3258 supports ECC, will this be a capable CPU for running FreeNAS with Sabnzbd, SickBeard & Plex.

5. Does the motherboard have to support ECC ram for ECC ram to work?

6. Does anyone have any motherboard suggestions, I will eventually want to fill up my 20 bay norco RPC-4220 so I'll eventually need to get 3 Sata expanders (Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8), as such I will need a full size ATX motherboard.


Thanks,
Chris.

 

[Ericloewe]

RE 1, 2, 3: Please read Cyberjock's guide (link in my sig).
4. - Not really. That specific CPU suggests you want to overclock - very bad idea.
5. - Yes.
6. - You seem rather confused. Please read the Hardware Recommendations Sticky for these last three questions (link in my sig). Also check out the SAS sticky.

 

[Christopher Ward]

Thanks for your help. After some reading I'm still confused about question 1, & 2

3. OK so you can't add additional drives later but you can take out the existing drives and put in larger capacity ones and rebuild 1 by 1 at a later date. so it would be worthwhile creating the max size zpool of 11 disks as outlined in the guide but I'm guessing it's 10 drives max if its raidz2?

My question then becomes can i use any random capacity drives in the same raidz2, like 5x500gb, 2x1tb, 3x2tb with all different makes or is it like hardware raid where you need the same capacity drives and make?

4. I don't really care for overclocking and probably wont be doing that but i noticed in the hardware thread for the low end cpus it recommends G3220 for socket 1150 and the g3258 has a better spec. I live in the UK so the prices are roughly the same, I don't mind spending £5 more if i'm going to get a bit more performance from it. Do you think its a good enough CPU if i dont overclock?

5/6. Thanks for the motherboard suggestions I'll probably go with one of those. The Supermicro X9SCM-F looks a great choice for what I need but it's socket 1155 so I'll need to do some thinking. Right now I'm only starting out with 8 drives which most motherboards probably only come with 6 or 8 but I'm thinking down the line if i can just drop in a sata expander card into it to add more drives ,

Also I have another question, some times the power goes out in my house, will that be problematic if it's doing something and the data is stored in ram? might be better off also getting a UPS.

Thanks again for your help,
Chris.

 

[Christopher Ward]

I've decided to re-purpose some of the stuff from what will be my old server (Media, SQL, Web Server, Minecraft Server) and make 2 new servers. A Media server & Minecraft Server/SQL/WEB server.

These are the parts I've picked for the media server. The stuff highlighted in green is the stuff I would need to buy and the rest I already have. The CPU is probably overkill but its a xeon and supports ECC and is on socket 1155 so i can get one of Supermicro motherboards that is recommended in the hardware thread.

What do you think?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

After some reading I'm still confused about question 1, & 2

1. Yes, you can mix brands and sizes in one vdev, and ZFS will behave as though they are all the size of the smallest drive.
2. Yes, as long as you recognize that your data will be at higher risk than if you just use individual drives, because one drive failure will take all the data with it.

3. OK so you can't add additional drives later but you can take out the existing drives and put in larger capacity ones and rebuild 1 by 1 at a later date.

Correct

so it would be worthwhile creating the max size zpool of 11 disks as outlined in the guide but I'm guessing it's 10 drives max if its raidz2?

Technically there is no "max" number of drives for any configuration of vdev, but the wider you go, the more vulnerable you are to data loss (and performance will suffer, especially IOPS).

might be better off also getting a UPS.

Many experience folks here consider a UPS to be a necessity with FreeNAS.