Hardware Upgrades

[greenwas]

I initially failed to read the stickies concerning HW choices and am thinking about a small course correction. I have found this SuperMicro machine on Ebay which is a 24 drive enclosure; I would like to have room for future upgrades. My main question is whether or not the back plane is limited to SAS 3G/6G or if back planes are just pathways for the data to travel across and do not play into the bandwidth consideration. Also if I were to go this route would I be better served to get a different Xeon board and maybe some new power supplies or just toss in another Opteron and load it up with RAM?

 

[cyberjock]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/846/sc846tq-r900.cfm For standard platter based hard drives, 3Gb/sec far exceeds their speeds anyway. The only time that SAS/SATA 6Gbps matters is if you plan to use SSDs.

That machine would be a good place to start. It has lots of RAM slots, but uses DDR2, which is very expensive per GB compared to DDR3. Any new power supplies you buy will have to be compatible with the Supermicro case. The standard ATX PSUs you buy for your desktops won't fit.

I'm not an AMD guy so I can't vouch for how good that CPU will be for ZFS. But I will say that if you bought that system you'll probably have to make some upgrades to it to make it more friendly for ZFS in the RAM department. On the surface it does look like that server is a steal at that price though. That case alone is probably worth the $350. If you are committed to building a server for FreeNAS and are okay with buying that just for the case(in case its not worth upgrading the CPU or RAM if needed), I'd probably go for it.