HP n40l + 4*3TB

[riskaka]

Hi

I am planning to replace my old freenas server with a new one. It's a quite old box and some of the sata ports on it have stopped working. So that's not very nice.

The server i have been looking at is the HP Proliant n40l. I have been planning on using the 3TB Seagate barracuda disks in it with about 4GB ram. I won't use ZFS and will have them all running as single disks.

What i will use it for: mainly streaming movies to my HTPC (HD Video) and bittorrent with some neat rss-script.

How well will it work with this setup? Is there any changes i should make? Maybe re-think the whole server? :/


Thanks!

 

[Hexland]

If I remember correctly, the N40L doesn't officially support 3Tb disks. I'm pretty sure they'll work (I remember finding threads talking about them a while back when I bought my N40L). I'm running 6x2Tb drives. Google is your friend in this case.

As cool as the N40L is as a microserver - I'm still not entirely happy with the performance on mine... I ended up installing 8Gb, a separate Intel Gb NIC and an IBM 1015 SAS controller (the integrated drive controller was exacerbating some 'breathing' issues I was having with RAID-Z2 in combination with the low power CPU)

I'm seriously considering building a new i5 or i7 machine from scratch to replace it. It was a good idea at the time, but I can't help feeling it's going to come back and bite me later on.

Your mileage may vary, of course :)

 

[jgreco]

The N36L and N40L are going to be a little hard to beat for footprint, but as far as performance goes, they're not that hot. "Low power" CPU, well, maybe, but for only a modest number of watts more, you can have i3, i5, i7, or even Xeon based systems - if you pick your parts carefully. Last time I checked, the N36L uses about 35-40 watts at idle, no drives. I've got Xeon E3-1230 based systems that idle around 45-50 watts - with four times as much memory and tons more CPU capacity.

If you only need light fileserving duties, the N40L is definitely attractive as a packaged solution that is likely to work with a minimum of fuss. I'd certainly consider streaming movies to be reasonably light duty. However, it is also going to be limited in terms of expansion capabilities, so be sure that the 4x3TB configuration is what you ultimately want. It'll be difficult to add more drives later.

There's no good reason not to put 8GB in, even if you're not using ZFS, RAM is cheap, more will often help performance.

 

[riskaka]

You guys are totally right. Maybe n40l isn't the best choice for me, especially since i might want to expand in the future. I have also been looking in to "FUJITSU PRIMERGY TX100" or simply building my own. I would probably try to match the fujitsu hardware but with a better case with room for at least 6 drives.

 

[jgreco]

There seem to be a lot of variants on the TX100. It's hard to know what exactly you're looking at.

The sweet spot for six drives is probably the Fractal Array R2 NAS case, a mini-ITX case. For eight drives, the Fractal Define series has several options, though some of them are no longer available. Going beyond that probably ought to involve getting a rackmount chassis, or possibly an external array with SAS expander. There are lots of options, and you'll probably be able to find someone here who has done something similar to anything you decide on. Some searching will give you valuable clues.

 

[Hexland]

You could do a lot worse than this one (for $80 today)

http://dealnews.com/Thermaltake-NVIDIA-Full-Tower-ATX-PC-Case-for-80-after-rebate-free-shipping/611149.html

11 bays ... yummy :)

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, that's pretty respectable, as long as you don't mind your fileserver being bathed in ever-changing colors, heh. It looks like it'd be awesome for keeping drives cool, much moreso than your average case.

 

[riskaka]

I have been rethinking this a bit... and i do think that i will get the most of the NAS if i build it myself. This is what i am thinking of:

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3V, mATX
CPU: Intel Core i3 2120 3,3GHz
Memory: Corsair 8GB (2x4096MB) CL9 1600Mhz
PSU: Antec VP550P 550W
Case: "Fractal Design Define Black"

I might add a intel NIC later on and if i will need it... i might also add a SATA controller(maybe the IBM one) but that's later.

What do you guys think of this?

 

[Stephens]

Don't forget the Intel G620 CPU as an alternative to the 2120 (or 2120T).

Anyway, it looks fine, though I'm surprised you don't care if one of your drives crashes and you lose all your data. Are you still planning to use "single drives" and no ZFS?

 

[riskaka]

Thanks guys! Sorry i haven't answered in a while.

Yeah, i still plan on using single drives... mostly because that's what i am used to and since that will give me the most space available. Maybe ZFS is a good idea, but how much loss of space will there be(for parity disks etc)?

 

[jgreco]

Loss of space is directly related to how much redundancy you select. If you use RAIDZ, you lose one drive's worth of space. If you use RAIDZ2, two... but then you can also tolerate the loss of a drive.