AliceWonderMiscreations
Dabbler
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2015
- Messages
- 21
Hello, Newbie here.
My experience with Linux goes back to MKLinux DR3 - a port of Red Hat 5.2 to the Mach Microkernel running on 32-bit PPC.
Other than a Windows laptop for Photoshop (DSLR) I'm currently running CentOS 7 for everything.
I will soon be building an NAS and I believe ZFS to be the best filesystem for that task. I believe the inclusion of RAID and Logical Volume Management into the filesystem itself has significant benefits over separate software components for the file system, RAID, and LVM.
ZFS can work in CentOS 7 but it looks like the best support is in FreeBSD which makes FreeNAS the logical choice for me. It appears that RHEL engineers don't consider ZFS support to be a goal of theirs, which means kernel updates could break the third party ZFS drivers available for CentOS, which is not acceptable for a backup device.
The primary purpose of the NAS will be for backing up various computers on my home network. There is no secondary purpose, at least not yet. I will not use it for things like multimedia server. I will not use it for files that are used in an application while the NAS is mounted on another computer. I will not use it for a database.
It will just sit there on the network, when a computer needs to do a backup (or restore from a backup), it is there for that purpose.
The board I plan to use :
SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA
It looks like a revision of the same board I see referenced in some of the FreeNAS documentation and forum posts as working well. For CPU - Xeon E3 (quad core). For the NAS - six 4TB Red NAS drives.
I plan on using RAIDZ2 which if I ubderstand correctly means I will have 12TB of storage, and two drives worth of redunancy, so it would take 3 drive failures to kill the pool.
The board has six SATA II headers which should be plenty to saturate a gigabit network, especially since my switches are cheap consumer switches so I doubt the gigabit NIC itself will ever actually flow at gigabit.
Is there any reason I shouldn't use the SATA II on the board?
As it will be serving as a backup server and not a source of data being used by live applications, I do not believe I will benefit from an L2ARC device.
I may benefit from a ZIL device, thoughts / experience ?
I plan to start with 16GB of ECC (board requires ECC) and if that proves to be not enough, max it out to 32GB which is the board limit.
For booting the NAS I am considering a Super Talent "Half Mini 2 PCIe SM1 16GB IDE SSD (MLC)"
Basically, I don't like flash drives hanging off a USB port. I just don't like them. I have never heard of Super Talent before and do not know if they are reliable, but at least the concept of what they make is what I want - the board has 3 PCI-E slots, I figure use one of them for the boot device. But I have no idea if FreeBSD supports that card. It's nice conceptually because it just slips in the PCI-E slot, no external component, no wires to drive, no power cable needed.
Sequential Read Rate: 98 MB/s (max)
Sequential Write Rate: 22 MB/s (max)
Interface: IDE / PATA
My assumption is generic IDE/PATA drivers will work with it.
Anyone have experience with that card or a similar concept in FreeBSD / FreeNAS ?
In the event I do need a ZIL device, I would probably purchase another PCI-E card with two or more SATA-III headers for two SSD devices.
Is there a particular card that people really like that works well with FreeBSD?
I only ask because if I see it on incredible sale I'll pick it up whether I need it or not in case I end up needing it.
-=-
It will be months before I build this, I still have to run cat6 to the room where it will live, I have backup now that works but just not ideal, and there's another box I will be building first.
Mostly I'll probably be fairly silent on the forum until then, can't really answer questions until I have experience with FreeNAS, but I thought I'd introduce myself and ask those questions I do have.
Thank you for your thoughts and your time,
Michael A. Peters
Alice Wonder Miscreations
My experience with Linux goes back to MKLinux DR3 - a port of Red Hat 5.2 to the Mach Microkernel running on 32-bit PPC.
Other than a Windows laptop for Photoshop (DSLR) I'm currently running CentOS 7 for everything.
I will soon be building an NAS and I believe ZFS to be the best filesystem for that task. I believe the inclusion of RAID and Logical Volume Management into the filesystem itself has significant benefits over separate software components for the file system, RAID, and LVM.
ZFS can work in CentOS 7 but it looks like the best support is in FreeBSD which makes FreeNAS the logical choice for me. It appears that RHEL engineers don't consider ZFS support to be a goal of theirs, which means kernel updates could break the third party ZFS drivers available for CentOS, which is not acceptable for a backup device.
The primary purpose of the NAS will be for backing up various computers on my home network. There is no secondary purpose, at least not yet. I will not use it for things like multimedia server. I will not use it for files that are used in an application while the NAS is mounted on another computer. I will not use it for a database.
It will just sit there on the network, when a computer needs to do a backup (or restore from a backup), it is there for that purpose.
The board I plan to use :
SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA
It looks like a revision of the same board I see referenced in some of the FreeNAS documentation and forum posts as working well. For CPU - Xeon E3 (quad core). For the NAS - six 4TB Red NAS drives.
I plan on using RAIDZ2 which if I ubderstand correctly means I will have 12TB of storage, and two drives worth of redunancy, so it would take 3 drive failures to kill the pool.
The board has six SATA II headers which should be plenty to saturate a gigabit network, especially since my switches are cheap consumer switches so I doubt the gigabit NIC itself will ever actually flow at gigabit.
Is there any reason I shouldn't use the SATA II on the board?
As it will be serving as a backup server and not a source of data being used by live applications, I do not believe I will benefit from an L2ARC device.
I may benefit from a ZIL device, thoughts / experience ?
I plan to start with 16GB of ECC (board requires ECC) and if that proves to be not enough, max it out to 32GB which is the board limit.
For booting the NAS I am considering a Super Talent "Half Mini 2 PCIe SM1 16GB IDE SSD (MLC)"
Basically, I don't like flash drives hanging off a USB port. I just don't like them. I have never heard of Super Talent before and do not know if they are reliable, but at least the concept of what they make is what I want - the board has 3 PCI-E slots, I figure use one of them for the boot device. But I have no idea if FreeBSD supports that card. It's nice conceptually because it just slips in the PCI-E slot, no external component, no wires to drive, no power cable needed.
Sequential Read Rate: 98 MB/s (max)
Sequential Write Rate: 22 MB/s (max)
Interface: IDE / PATA
My assumption is generic IDE/PATA drivers will work with it.
Anyone have experience with that card or a similar concept in FreeBSD / FreeNAS ?
In the event I do need a ZIL device, I would probably purchase another PCI-E card with two or more SATA-III headers for two SSD devices.
Is there a particular card that people really like that works well with FreeBSD?
I only ask because if I see it on incredible sale I'll pick it up whether I need it or not in case I end up needing it.
-=-
It will be months before I build this, I still have to run cat6 to the room where it will live, I have backup now that works but just not ideal, and there's another box I will be building first.
Mostly I'll probably be fairly silent on the forum until then, can't really answer questions until I have experience with FreeNAS, but I thought I'd introduce myself and ask those questions I do have.
Thank you for your thoughts and your time,
Michael A. Peters
Alice Wonder Miscreations