Is this build ok?

[boris_lee]

I'm using freenas on HP Microserver Gen8 in home for 2 yrs and oversatified about it.
and now I'm planning to build a bigger one for my department use(I worked at a small research institute in China ,and partly act as the IT expert for my dept of about 20 people.)
The use case is mainly as a samba file server for near-line storage,and hosting my department's tiny internal web site(just static HTML for announcements,and a web mail),and maybe temporarily(2-3 weeks per time,<5 times per year) host a few(<10) virtual machine's storage (the computing task is on another server with powerful CPU but w/o big storage)for testing purposes.
The planned config is
2U rack server w 12*3.5 SAS drive bay（HUAWEI RH2288） /Xeon E5-2609V4(8cores/1.7GHz) /32GB ECC RAM/Intel X520 dual 10Gbit NIC/12*3TB or 4TB NL SAS drive
3*16GB sandisk cruzer fit drive mirrored for boot env

my problem is:
1.Is the CPU over or under configured？I've chosen it for it's the 2nd cheap one in the server model's processor options.And there's an E5 1620 V4(4C*3.5GHz) at same price,high frequency/less cores and lower freq/more cores,which one is better for freenas?
2.I know the more the better, but is 32GB RAM enough?
3.If 64GB RAM recommended,Should I add a L2ARC/ZIL device?

Thx a lot in advance!

 

[darkwarrior]

HI there,

you mention that you're using SAMBA in particular, so the E5-1620 will probably a much better choice.
SAMBA loves raw Clock speed and is single threaded, so you will get much better performance in that way.

Starting off with 32GB of RAM should be OK, just be ready to go up to 64GB if you notice some performance issues.
After this you might want to add an L2ARC for additional caching.
But from this quick overview of your workload, I don' think you will have any benefit of having a SLOG device (what you called ZIL).
You will definitely want to read up more on all these matters ;)