HP Microserver N54L FreeNAS box hardware advice

[coalfield]

So I made an impulse purchase to buy one of the HP N54L microserver as they were on offer, with the aim of upgrading my 4x3TB Software (Motherboard) raid5 array currently on my PC, to an independent NAS box. After previously using WHS, I saw that FreeNAS includes Plexserver which is pretty much the only other thing besides serving files I need the box to do.

I then purchased 5x Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB drives to go with it.

I flashed the BIOS of the server to allow full data rate on all the SATA ports.

After a first install of FREENAS and setting a RAID-Z array, the read / write performance was ~50MB/s but then dropped over time. This was with the standard 2GB ECC memory.

I tried installing 8GB, followed by 16GB from my desktop (non-ecc) to see if there was an improvement. It did not affect the throughput much, and I suspect its due to the combination of poor CPU and on board SATA controller.

I was toying with the idea of a HP P410 RAID card and just opting for a RAID5 / WHS install. However after reading the manual I am strongly considering getting a M1015 ServeRaid SAS/SATA PCI-e RAID Controller and cross-flashing it to 9211-8i. However what I am really curious to see if anyone can tell me is how much will this affect my performance taking into consideration I will be using a very low performance CPU?

I was kind of hoping by purchasing the M1015 the SATA R/W load would be taken off the CPU, freeing it up to work on ZFS and greatly impact my performance. I really would like to max out the 1GBps LAN at the very least, particularly on reads with 5 drives.

My other question relates to RAM. I have 4GB (2x2GB) memory. From everything I have read, I should really have a min of double that for 5x3TB, however would the M1015 go any way to negate that? With currently memory prices this box could end up costing more than a drobos or similar which I was trying to save against!

Sorry this is quite n00b but your advise is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

The N54L is a slow box. With UFS, you could probably saturate gigabit. With ZFS, ZFS is pretty fat and piggy and resource-hungry. The N54L may not have the muscle to do it.

The M1015 is a HBA and doesn't "offload" much of anything. It is simply a good way to attach drives, but not substantially better than the controller in the N54L.

The RAM required by ZFS is a function of implementation choices made by the FreeNAS authors and ZFS's naturally insatiable appetite.

I know this isn't exactly what you wanted to hear. Your hardware can probably max out the gigabit if you don't use ZFS though, so you can decide which thing you prefer.