Long thread, hardware, trying not to shoot self in foot.

[StitchExperimen]

Okay, I'm trying to not shoot myself in the foot. These questions are about hardware.
The big question is about processor and motherboard but first.

The IBM ServeRAID M1015. I have a question. The card supports 8 drives. Can you put 2 cards in identical PCIe slots and control 16 drives with ZFS?

Story: I have my first mid-tower server/workstation, I don't use the second processor so I have an extra AMD Opteron 4386 8 core no hyper threading processor. However I don't have any Intel part to compare it against. It does use the Piledriver architecture and on a clock for clock rate is slower than a similar Intel frequency. So the first basic question is should I scrap this processor as a build part though I do have all the cooling parts. The speed of the processor at loaf is 3.1 GHz, 3.4 GHz all core turbo, and 3.8 GHz 4 or less cores. This processor came out in Dec 2012, and new costs $350 used $300 but nobody on ebay is buying them The next part is the price of the motherboard.

The motherboard in my server/workstation is Asus $250. I have been advised to shy away from it and use Supermicro for better support and I'm guessing the OS. I'm a light weight in Linux and the drivers listed in the following motherboards were under SUSE and RHEL .

The least expensive is shallow looking to me in usable PCIe slots.
1 PCI-E 2.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
1 PCI-E 2.0 x8
1 PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8 slot)
1 PCI
Single processor
4 memory slots
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron4000/SR56x0/H8SCM.cfm
Cost $230

The other board by Supermicro is.
Dual Processor
1 PCI-E 2.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
3 PCI-E 2.0 x8
1 PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8 slot)
1 PCI
4 memory slots per processor
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron4000/SR56x0/H8DCL-iF.cfm
$70 more
$300
16 GB stick of rdimm 1600 1.35V (cheapest of all listing types) is $160 shipped so $320
I got the IBM 1015
So far I cut one corner, the case. I got a Fractal Design Arc XL and ordered an extra 4 bay drive cage that can fit in the bottom.
I purchased a Cyberpower sinewave app smart UPS 1500VA 900 watt great however it's so small in size 11 minutes at half load. 2 minutes at full load. The box was big and I pulled out a chihuahua compared to my last smart ups unit.

I on sale 2 4TB Seagate NAS drives so it looks that's the route I'm headed. Fasted Large block serial performance and WD RED has better small block quick access performance. So what is the block size in ZFS on a 4TB drive? Thanks for your expertise and time.

 

[Rand]

I am not really sure what your questions are but
-Yes you can use 2x M1015
-You don't need to use a supermicro Mobo, if you already have an ASUS Server Board give it a try; the Opteron should be ok. Depends on your workload which you dont mention
-Block size or Sector Size? ZFS can be created with 4K or 512byte Sectors depending on the drive. I dont think you will see much real world difference between Seagate NAS or WD Red drives, maybe 10%

 

[StitchExperimen]

In answer to your question it's an additional new build. Sorry for the confusion. I asked in another thread and got advice and have been re-reading that advice (see link). After making this post. Do I dump the AMD processor in favor of a more tried configuration or will the Supermicro motherboard make the Opteron viable. Or what are other options in Intel are there what processor, minimum speed, cores/hyper-threading, used processors/new motherboard, memory cost, single/dual processor upgradable. http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...a-build-component-opinions.19578/#post-109727
The case is a Fractal design ARC XL 12 drives capable

 

[Rand]

Better stick to one thread;)
But - if you only have the CPU and no mobo then it depends on whether you have the cash to buy a new Mobo+ CPU or not.
Depending on your ?workload? the AMD will usually be ok even if its not mainstream.
Check Cost of AMD Board vs Itel CPU+Board in regards to expected workload. If you have little load a cheap CPU and Board might be better than a new AMD Board.

 

[joeschmuck]

There is no reason for the AMD Opteron to not work for you, I haven't heard of a single issue with it running FreeBSD which FreeNAS is built on. The real question is what are you comfortable purchasing. You need some parts no matter how you slice it.

So what do you want to do with this FreeNAS system? How large do you see the storage growing? Will you be servicing many users (many to me is 20 or more active users)? Will you need high throughput? How much do you want to spend?

In general most users will do great with 16GB ECC RAM, a CPU that runs around 3GHz, and figuring out how much storage they require.

You asked about hard drive 4k blocks. All hard drives manufactured since Jan 2013 should be 4k blocks internally, meaning as written on the hard drive platter. On the SATA interface it will be a 512 byte block interface for compatibility as very few drives can actually talk in 4k blocks over the SATA connector, and the drive will handle the work taking the 512 byte blocks into 4k blocks. That may change some day but it's not something to be concerned about today. If you want to know more then I suggest you Google it.