My First NAS build, could use a helpfull eye.

[penetal]

So my first NAS box ever, and I would be appreciative if some of you would look over what I have in mind and give me your thoughts.

Motherboard, all the SATA i need right now as I only have 4x WD RED drives and 2 old SSDs for cache:
Supermicro X10SLH-F

Memory isn't as easy to find it seems, supermicros site only gives me 1 chip that is qualified for the board with 8GB giving the max of 32GB when filling the board. I can also only find one store, in a neighboring country, which has it in stock. Samsung M391B1G73Bh0-CK0.

Case, its as small as I could find and still have enough slots for me to expand the RAID-Z1 pool I have later if I wish to.
Lian-Li V354

CPU the MOBO's spec says its compatible with "Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1200 v3 " does that litteraly mean I can only choose that one spessific CPU or from the family of E3-12XXv3?


Lastly, have any of you gotten corrupt data due to lack of ECC? That shit is expensive, and if its recommended but not stricktly nessesary (for home use) I think I'll go mini-ITX with 16GB ram instead (16GB because that seems to be it for mini-ITX)

Anything you would change here, some awefull choices? I would really like to cut cost, but with ECC and AES-NI needs that doesn't seem to be doable.

 

[jgreco]

X10SLH-F. Nice looking board, but with the dual i210AT LAN, you'll want to see whether or not FreeBSD and FreeNAS currently support that in 8.* ... there was another forum posting on this where I actually investigated that a little and posted more info.

The Supermicro boards are generally very tolerant with memory, I expect most of them have released parts for these boards. Kingston offers the 32GB KVR16E11K4/32 kit for example.

There is no "E3-1200 v3" processor. It is a processor family. The board also takes 4th gen Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron processors in the LGA 1150 form factor, which it also lists in the spec.

A few extra bucks for ECC is not expensive. Losing your pool is expensive. Remember that ZFS does not protect you from stupid system design. If it is doing a scrub, reading your pool, and it thinks it is seeing errors on the disks, but they're actually errors you are introducing because of flaky memory, ZFS will "correct" the errors and what ends up happening is that it replaces what used to be good data on disk with bad data on disk. This appears to have happened to some people in the past. If you can afford a thousand dollars for four hard drives, a system board, a power supply, a CPU, etc., and you cannot afford a few extra bucks for ECC RAM, .. well I think it's a stupid move.

 

[penetal]

Its not just the RAM itself, it's everything becoming more expensive when I have to make it ECC compatible. Also the case itself becomes larger (compared to mini-ITX). I realize FreeNAS is made with ECC in mind and that its the safest way to go. It just seems so many opts for non ECC builds without much problems.

Are you sure Kingston KVR16E11K4/32 will work without problems? I really want to go for a good build, but I'm really fresh on server grade setups.

Also, the OS compatibility list for the MOBO does not list FreeBSD 8.3, just 9.1 as compatible. it seems, any thoughts?

PS: know of a really good choice in USB 3 stick to use as OS drive? Seems the MOBO has internal USB connection on the picture (though I'm not sure I see it in the specification list).

 

[jgreco]

Right. Going with non-ECC is not a problem, at all. Until it's a problem. It is like riding around without your seat belt in a car. It is a perfectly fine thing to do. Until that one day, which might possibly never happen, but if and when you smack into a brick wall, and you're wearing your seat belt, well, you won't be shot out of the windshield and go face first into a brick wall.

Look, really, I don't care enough to argue extensively about it. Your data, your problem.

As far as the Kingston, Kingston says it is compatible, and in the past, Supermicro boards have been very non-finicky. But I don't have that board and I don't have that RAM.

 

[penetal]

Alright, thanks for your input on the matter its much appreciated! :)