New build

[damian]

Hello, I'm currently in the process of building a new storage system to replace my current ageing windows solution, and hopefully you guys can give me some input as to what hardware to get. Please keep in mind that my wallet isn't exactly fat, some of these I already had or got for a good price.

What I have already:

• Lian-Li PC-Q25B
• 7x Western Digital RE4 2TB (WD2003FYYS)
• Asus H87I-Plus LGA 1150
• StarTech USB A Female to USB Motherboard 4 Pin Header F/F
• Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 8GB
• Intel Gigabit ET2 Quad Port Server Adapter

What I'm thinking of getting:

• Silverstone ST45SF 450W PSU

What I'm missing:

• RAM - 16gb, but not sure about ECC/reg/buffered/unbuffered
• CPU - Something with AES-NI so I could utilize full disk encryption without taking a huge performance hit

Any recommendations or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[damian]

Update:

I went ahead and got an i3-4130, 8gb kingston cl9 ddr3 ram, I wanted to go with ECC, but it seems the motherboard I had did not support it, even thought I specifically remember reading on some forum that it did (Ooops, my mistake for not double checking).

Freenas 9.1 running off an internal Patriot 8gb USB stick. Used Win32DiskImager, no problems writing the image or booting off the stick, found my quad Intel gbit card off the bat, although I'm not really sure if I need the LACP link aggregation - been thinking about replacing it with a SATA multiplier card so I could put more drives to use. Currently I'm running 6 WD RE4's in a raid-z2 setup, but with a multiplier card, I could get that to 7 RE4's and and SSD for a separate log device giving me a total of 10TB usable space.

Pardon the mess in the case, I haven't tucked everything away properly yet - thinking of getting new SATA cables as well, I used some old ones I had laying around but who knows the quality of em, the last thing I want is checksum errors because of a crappy cable.

So what do you guys think. Stick with the NIC, or go for the SATA ports?

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, I'd be less worried with SATA cables and more worried about ECC RAM. If a SATA cable goes bad you get SMART errors and rarely see any kind of corruption. And even if there was corruption, it would be limited to that single bad disk which would be fixed by ZFS with redunancy.

ECC RAM on the other hand has the capability to trash your pool as well as your backup location.

 

[gpsguy]

You'll probably need more than 8Gb of RAM before you think about enhancements.


Sent from my phone

 

[damian]

Thank you, both good points! The extra drives were really more of a future thing, since I only really have about 4TB to transfer to the pool right now... I was going to grab 16GB of RAM but my wallet couldn't handle the extra $ atm, I got a failing array that this box is replacing and I needed it up ASAP. The ECC RAM issue is another problem, again, no $ for a new mobo and ram - at least the CPU is fine. Hopefully the pool doesn't get trashed until I can afford the upgrades :/