Mother Board compatibility - Asus F1A75-M PRO

[NWUK]

Hi All,

First time post so please be gentle with me.... ;-)

I have been testing Freenas 8 on an old Atom 330 and I have to say FreeNAS is very stable and very feature rich. I'm ready to take the next step which is to build a decent spec box. It's for home use and the plan is to carve up the storage using CIFS for file sharing amongst windows 7 guests and NFS for a number of Linux servers that I run. I also run a Linux KVM 2 node cluster so eventually I would like to store my virtual guests on FreeNAS and access the storage using iSCSI and a cluster file system such as GFS2 / OCFS. With future expansion in mind I'm looking at the following:

Case: Lian Li PC-V354B
MoBo: Asus F1A75-M PRO, AMD A75, S FM1, DDR3, SATA III - 6Gb/s, RAID SATA, PCIe 2.0 (x16), Graphics On Board, mATX
Disks: WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA III
RAM: Probably 16GB DDR3 still deliberating on brand etc.
Boot Drive: USB Stick (already working on the Atom 330 with FreeNAS Build FreeNAS-8.0.2-RELEASE-amd64 (8288) )
PSU: Still deliberating

Existing LAN: Gb


I just wondered if anybody has or is using the Asus F1A75-M PRO motherboard and if the SATA Controller and onboard NIC are compatible with FreeNAS 8? Also if anybody has any recommendations on a decent CPU to fit to the motherboard which could handle running RAID Z2 using the six 1TB disks. I haven't selected specific RAM or a PSU yet so if anybody else is using this motherboard any tips would be greatly appreciated.

The spec is probably slightly overkill for what I want to do initially but eventually I want to also stream music and video so I am looking to build a system with room to add extra RAM later and maybe even upgrade to 2TB disks in the future. Initially I will be using NFS mounted on a Linux KVM virtual guest which runs Bacula to backup my existing Linux and Windows servers. What I also want to be able to do with my new FreeNAS setup is learn more about ZFS and understand as much of the FreeNAS functionality as possible so whilst initially it will be a useful work horse I also want to use it for self development purposes so any suggestions / recommendations / tips would be gratefully received.

Thanks

 

[NWUK]

Hi

As nobody appears to be using the above specification I decided to play safe and reuse some existing kit and purchase parts to upgrade it. Details as follows:

1. Re-use HP Pavilion A6761UK PC
Motherboard: ASUS IPIBL-LB (Benicia-GL8E) Intel G33 Chipset mATX
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5Ghz
RAM: 4 x 2GB DDR2 PC2-6400 (800 Mhz)

2. Icy Dock MB994SP-4S 4in1 SAS/SATA Hot Swap Backplane 5.25" RAID cage
=> 4 x 750GB Western Digital WD7500BPKT Scorpio Black, 2.5", 9.5 mm, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 16MB Cache

3. 2 x 1TB Western Digital WD1003FBYX RE4 Enterprise 24x7, 3.5" HDD, SATA II - 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, NCQ

4. 4 x AK-CBSA05-30BL - 30cm Akasa Super Slim SATA rev 3.0 data cable with securing latches - Blue (I reused the existing SATA cable from the DVD drive and hard drive I removed from the PC)

5. FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2-x64 (11367) installed on a bootable Micro SD card (using the xzcat method)

All the parts were easy to install and no DOAs. The only issue I have is that I need to file back a bit of the plastic on the front bezel where the DVD drive used to live as the bezel doesn't sit fulsh with the case. I'll probably just shave a bit of plastic off with a stanley knife.

I've initially set up the 2 3.5" drives as a RAIDZ stripe for performance. The intention is to use them for iSCSI storage

The 4 2.5" drives are configured as RAIDZ2. The intention is to run CIFS and NFS shares to my Linux servers from these disks plus store my Bacula backups.

Being completely new to ZFS I've got some serious reading to do. Can anybody point me in the direction of a really good FreeBSD tutorial or documentation for ZFS?

 

[ProtoSD]

These should keep you busy for awhile! ;)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?16-Getting-the-most-out-of-ZFS-pools!

https://blogs.oracle.com/video/entry/becoming_a_zfs_ninja

http://lildude.co.uk/zfs-cheatsheet

 

[NWUK]

Thanks very much protosd the videos in particular are excellent.