Hi, I'm Chris, and I've got a Tech Addiction

[majic79]

Hi everyone, wanted to sign up as I'm in the process of building up my own NAS. For the past few years I've been playing around with hacking existing NAS systems (WD MyBook, Seagate GoFlex Home...) to make them do what I want, now I've taken the plunge and I'm building up my own spec (something I have a lot of experience in, having built custom PC systems for myself and close family for the past 20 years or so)

I'll share what I'm building now, and what the next purchase will be, criticisms welcome!

Based around a SuperMicro A1SRi-C2758F motherboard (octacore Atom) and 32GB of Kingston ECC DDR3 @ 1600MHz
boot drive as a 60GB Kingston SSD Now drive with secondary boot on a SanDisk 32GB Ultra fit
HBA is a LSI MegaRaid SAS 9240-8i with 5x WD Red 3TB drives attached.
Housed in a CFI 5 Bay Mini-ITX NAS enclosure

Planning on running this system as my Domain controller (my PC count keeps climbing and having a centralised directory store will make my life so much easier!) as well as media server (plex) for home streaming. I'm in two minds as to running RAIDZ1 (good fit for 5 drives) or RAIDZ2 (max redundancy). Planning on also seeing if I can run a Minecraft server on this puppy as well (save the cost of running a Linode!)

Next purchase is a UPS while I wait for the motherboard to arrive

That's me, no doubt I'll have some questions in the near future - now I just need parts to finish shipping so I can put it all together!

 

[BigDave]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[JoshDW19]

Welcome to the forums @majic79!

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Based around a SuperMicro A1SRi-C2758F motherboard (octacore Atom) and 32GB of Kingston ECC DDR3 @ 1600MHz
boot drive as a 60GB Kingston SSD Now drive with secondary boot on a SanDisk 32GB Ultra fit
HBA is a LSI MegaRaid SAS 9240-8i with 5x WD Red 3TB drives attached.
Housed in a CFI 5 Bay Mini-ITX NAS enclosure

There is no need for a HBA with 5 HDDs and a single SSD as the A1SRi-C2758F has 6 SATA ports. SATA2 is perfectly okay for WD Red drives.

 

[majic79]

True, but I'm planning on running an SSD for FreeNAS boot, and if I find I ever want to upgrade (ZIL or L2ARC caches) then I'll be out of luck. This way I have 3 leftover ports on the same HBA that I can dedicate to these options in the future

 

[danb35]

if I find I ever want to upgrade (ZIL or L2ARC caches)

You can't run enough RAM on that board to benefit from L2ARC, and unless your use case will involve heavy sync writes you won't benefit from an SLOG.

Certainly an HBA won't hurt, but with your described configuration it's wasted money now. You could always add one after the fact--FreeNAS won't care.

This way I have 3 leftover ports on the same HBA that I can dedicate to these options in the future

...plus five on the motherboard you won't have used yet.

 

[jgreco]

Hi, I'm Chris, and I've got a Tech Addiction

And now you've found the place where all the dealers hang out. Run. Go find a nice 12 step program.

 

[danb35]

Yeah, we're definitely not going to help cure the tech addiction--if anything, we'll enable it.

 

[Mirfster]

Welcome, do yourself a favor now... Hide your wallet, shred your Credit Cards and start thinking of viable excuses for spending money... ;)

 

[Spearfoot]

"Hello, my name is Spearfoot, and I'm a tech addict. It's been 63 days since my last server component purchase..."

 

[Ericloewe]

And now you've found the place where all the dealers hang out. Run. Go find a nice 12 step program. :)

Hey man, some good stuff came in today. I've got 300 kilos back at the warehouse... Shiny, good-as-new Supermicro chassis, prepared in a lab run by this guy I know, he's on the level, he doesn't dilute the product. Some labs swap out the Delta fans for Hong Hua, but I don't sell that crap. Poor fellow bought some of it and fried his hard drives.

 

[Spearfoot]

Hey man, some good stuff came in today. I've got 300 kilos back at the warehouse... Shiny, good-as-new Supermicro chassis, prepared in a lab run by this guy I know, he's on the level, he doesn't dilute the product. Some labs swap out the Delta fans for Hong Hua, but I don't sell that crap. Poor fellow bought some of it and fried his hard drives.

This fellow's name wouldn't happen to be "Heisenberg", would it?

 

[majic79]

This fellow's name wouldn't happen to be "Heisenberg", would it?

I'm uncertain...

 

[majic79]

You can't run enough RAM on that board to benefit from L2ARC, and unless your use case will involve heavy sync writes you won't benefit from an SLOG.

Certainly an HBA won't hurt, but with your described configuration it's wasted money now. You could always add one after the fact--FreeNAS won't care.


...plus five on the motherboard you won't have used yet.

Look, I'm a tech addict, professional nerd and hard core software developer - let me have my toys, besides, I like the ides of offloading some of the CPU work onto a dedicated card so the CPU can do funky things :D

 

[majic79]

And now you've found the place where all the dealers hang out.

And quite a few similarly afflicted if I dont' miss my guess!

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I can quit any time ...

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Look, I'm a tech addict, professional nerd and hard core software developer - let me have my toys, besides, I like the ides of offloading some of the CPU work onto a dedicated card so the CPU can do funky things :D

No luck here. As RaidZ in ZFS is essentially a sort of software RAID, the SAS 9240-8i has to be flashed to IT mode and the parity calculations are done by the CPU, just as if you were not using a HBA.

But maybe you can do funky things with the PowerPC 440 sitting on the SAS 9240-8i. Most of the BOINC projects need IEEE 754 floating point, so you could start by writing an emulator for that chip. ;)

 

[tfast500]

Why SSD boot drive and not a pair of USBs. This works great and frees up data ports.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[scwst]

True, but I'm planning on running an SSD for FreeNAS boot, and if I find I ever want to upgrade (ZIL or L2ARC caches) then I'll be out of luck. This way I have 3 leftover ports on the same HBA that I can dedicate to these options in the future

From what I've read, you really have to hammer the system to need ZIL or L2ARC. See https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzHapVfrocfwblFvMVdvQ2ZqTGM/view for a backgrounder on when you need them. The tl;dr is pretty much "never", followed by "dude, buy even more RAM".

 

[majic79]

Well, maybe I could have saved the money on the HBA, but I wanted to play around with one - coming from the early days of SCSI/IDE where SCSI outperformed IDE because the CPU can do other things after offloading the IO operations to the SCSI card, that's a small performance point I figured I could gain, plus I like the idea of the drives being all on the same speed bus with the CPU doing little more than marshal data in and out of the IO pool and not have to manage it. Besides, I have a tech addiction and I wanted to :D

Re: use of USB vs SSD, a friend of mine has reported problems with USB losing power and causing issues. It shouldn't be an issue if FreeNAS is running in memory, but I don't want to have something potentially not working and the cost of a 60GB SSD is not something I'm going to fret over.

"Buy even more RAM" - trust, if I could, I would! I've stretched my budget on RAM already, but 64GB of ECC (max supported on motherboard) is nearly 3x the cost of 32GB, so I'm going to live with 32GB and save the other ports for when I want to add another volume :D when I come around to expanding in the futur (or upgrade RAM and then add storage capacity).