Hardware Critique

[Michael Hodge]

Ok, I have most of my parts already and mainly need help picking out the hard drives.
What I had/have bought so far:

Motherboard: ASUS P8H77-I
CPU: Intel i3 2120
Memory: Team Vulcan 16GB (2x8GB)
Flash Drive: Kingston DataTraveler SE9 8GB

I am having the most trouble picking out hard drives and how many I need. I know I want to use 4TB hard drives and 4-6 of them. My board only has 2 RAM slots and only supports up to 16GBs. Would this be too little to support the 24TBs or even 20TBs I am thinking about getting? I will be putting them in RAIDZ so does the 1GB RAM to 1TB storage rule apply to all storage (20TB) or just usable storage (16TB)?

Also I was thinking about using the 4TB HGST Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000. I know its a desktop hard drive but will it work? Are there other better cheap options? This is another factor that will be the difference between getting 4, 5 or 6 drives. I would like to keep the price of the drive $200 or under (maybe a little over $200 if it is really advised).How does the motherboard hold up?

I know it has Realtek Ethernet which I did not know was bad when I bought it. Will this be a problem with the new FreeNAS? Any advice, problems/fixes you foresee would be gladly appreciated. It would be especially nice if you could help me choose a hard drive. I would be happy to answer any questions you have for me, especially if it will help you give me advice.

 

[jgreco]

Check to make sure your system supports ECC and that you actually buy ECC.

When I updated the current iteration of the RAM sizing advice in the manual, I specifically left it a little vague. The actual fact is that more RAM is usually better. Less RAM may result in reduced performance. If you are budget- or slot-constrained, you can consider it to be for "usable storage." It just happens to work out that RAM and space scale fairly well in proportion. You can make a 30TB usable (44TB actual) system that works acceptably well on 8GB of RAM ... but it may require some effort and tuning, and it probably will not be as zippy under load as the same system running on 64GB of RAM.

Desktop hard drives work, but be sure to read up on any advice specific to your model. For example, WD greens need to have idle time tweaked.

The 7K4000's are nice drives, but run warmer than 5900RPM units. They've been about $300/ea historically but think they've been falling lately.

Seagate has the new Barracuda (no longer called that) "Desktop HDD.15" which is an inexpensive option for bulk storage, $150 is a good price. Low power, lower temperature.

FreeNAS cannot fix your Realtek. It may work out fine or it may not. It depends on many things. You can basically just hope your hamster doesn't get sick and take it from there.

RAIDZ1 is something you may wish to avoid. Tolerant of a single drive failure, it can still render data unretrievable if a second failure (possibly as trite as a bad disk sector) appears during rebuilding on the replacement drive. RAIDZ2 is more robust. RAIDZ3 is better yet, and RAIDZ3 plus a warm spare drive is what us paranoids do.

 

[paleoN]

RAIDZ2 is more robust. RAIDZ3 is better yet, and RAIDZ3 plus a warm spare drive is what us paranoids do.

Heh, raidz3 plus a warm spare is extremely paranoid. I guess you need to take into account how long it takes you to service the machine after a drive failure. Hopefully, it's less than weeks.

 

[jgreco]

So I guess I shouldn't mention that there's also a cold spare that's been burned in for over a thousand hours, sitting on the shelf ready to go.

Oh, and the setup is 12 drives in a 24 bay enclosure, so if expansion ever occurs, it will effectively become two warm spares.

 

[paleoN]

So I guess I shouldn't mention that there's also a cold spare that's been burned in for over a thousand hours, sitting on the shelf ready to go.

As you know spares, rather tested spares, are your friend. You should always have some cold spares on hand. If you have room why not have one as a warm spare? My point was that raidz3 is more than sufficient without a warm spare around. Your much more likely to run into other failures at this point before losing 3 drives & having unrecoverable read errors. Unless the machine never gets serviced.

 

[jgreco]

If you have room why not have one as a warm spare? My point was that raidz3 is more than sufficient without a warm spare around. Your much more likely to run into other failures at this point before losing 3 drives & having unrecoverable read errors. Unless the machine never gets serviced.

I've been around long enough to see rapid consecutive failures in a system due to a bad batch of drives.

I've also been around long enough to know that actually *planning* for failure is the surest way to substantially reduce the chance of such events. Being ready and prepared to handle a multiple drive scenario means that Fate is more likely to move on to the poor schmuck who has only deployed RAIDZ1 or maybe RAIDZ2.

Of course, this will strike Fate as taunting fate, so I can safely assume the system will start on fire overnight.

 

[Michael Hodge]

Lol, so is the 4TB HGST Deskstar Coolspin OK with this. It may not actually be the 7K4000 it might be the 5400RPM equivalent. I found them for $152 at B&H photo http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/835055-REG/Hitachi_0S03359_4TB_Internal_Hard_Drive.html. This seems like the best for me if they will work decently. I have moderately scoured Google for issues while in a raid like the idle time issue with the WD greens you spoke about which was one f the reasons I decided to post before buying 4-6 of these bad boys. I also mentioned my motherboards Realtek NIC because the motherboard was recommended to me from another on this site who said he had a successful NAS box with FreeNAS, but I have seen a couple posts after the fact saying that Realtek NICs are bad and not recommended (I think I saw this in a sticky). Also I was seeing about a suggestion on how many TBs I should go for based on your experience for the RAM capacity of my MoBo. I understand that the general rule of thumb is 1GB RAM to 1TB storage and basically wanted to know if the parity drive (if its called that in ZFS RAID) counted towards the rule. 16GB is the max my MoBo will support so if 4x4TB HDDs is the max it will "sufficiently" hold (again based on experience) then I will limit it to that depending on the performance drop I may receive not sticking to the rule. This also affects the case I purchase being between the BitFenix Prodigy and the Fractal Design Node 304 (most likely will go with the Fractal since it is 15% off at Newegg atm which brings it very close in price to the BitFenix). I also have a 200w Dell, 250w HIPRO, 500w OCZ and 600w Thermaltake PSUs hanging around and not sure which to use in this situation. I'm kind of stuck with the MoBo, RAM and CPU since the MoBo and RAM have already been purchased and the CPU is being re-purposed and don't think any is ECC (is this bad? Should I just build a mini desktop with this and go for a NAS box later?). I'm starting to feel that my purchases are sub par and will have to go for a more server grade later. I think I'd be able to catch a RAIDZ disk failure fairly fast given how easy it would be to notice a failure with FreeNAS. I will likely have at least one cold spare on hand at all times. Again any advice is welcome, even if it is overly critical, I really just want to not spend a bunch of money on something that doesn't work or won't work well (80-100MBPS transfer is fine, what is a good rate for streaming high quality video?). I really appreciate the critiques.