New FreeNAS Build

[LIGISTX]

Old build still going strong, but that is a sever me and some buddies share. I am looking at building out my own with "only" ~20 TB of space.

I have gone through the new hardware recommendation thread and think I have my bearings with the new Skylake chips (avoiding Kaby since I plan on an i3).

I am planning to use Seagate Ironwolf 4 TB's, 8 of them to be exact in Z2, should provide a touch over 21 TB of formatted space.

i3-6100
MBD-X11SSM-F-O
SeaSonic G Series SSR-550RM 550W
M391A2K43BB1-CPB (16 GB ECC RAM)
Likely a Fractal R5 with intake fans for the HDD's


I guess my real question here is, how effective would the i3-6100 be. I know its in the "mid range" of choices, and I am not a power user *yet*. I am honestly still a huge FreeNAS noob since I don't have my own box to play on constantly. That being said, I don't see myself going TOOO crazy with it, but I will have the 8 drives in Z2 that I want decent performance out of (only trying to saturate Gigabit) and potentially a few jails. I do use crashplan so I will likely set that up, but that shouldn't be a resource hog at all, and will only be running at night...

As far as transcoding goes, I likely wouldn't ever have more than 1 device hitting it that requires transcoding of media. But I guess for my own understanding sake, how much transcoding would be expected from this CPU? Would I be able to get 2-3 streams going if I don't have much else going on, or would 1-2 be the best possible scenario?

I know the 1 TB -> 1 GB RAM recommendation drum is pounded hard, but I do not plan on having more then 2 clients hit the server at once (its really just for my personal use, I can't be in multiple places at once ...usually...) and its main purpose will be for storing MANY THOUSANDS of photos for lightroom to access, go pro video storage and playback, and multimedia playback via plex with the only real transcoding being possibly to my phone when I am not on my home network.

Also, since this motherboard I am pretty set on getting only has 8 SATA ports, I was planning to run FreeNAS off of USB. I do have a SSD laying around, so I could do USB --> SATA and use that for reliability sake. Any opinion on this option?

Any advice or opinions would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

 

[DrKK]

That's pretty much exactly what I have. Almost down to the individual items.

I think you're 10000% fine here. the i3-6100 will handle a couple transcoding streams no problem. If you're not going expensive-jail-crazy, I think you will find 16GB of RAM suitable.

Proceed with my compliments sir.

 

[DrKK]

I've got 3 posts on my build. Here is part 1.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/drkk-is-building-a-new-freenas.54079/

 

[LIGISTX]

Any advice on the seagate ironwolfs? I know most everyone uses reds, my last build did, but the ironswolfs are a little cheaper at the moment...

That's pretty much exactly what I have. Almost down to the individual items.

I think you're 10000% fine here. the i3-6100 will handle a couple transcoding streams no problem. If you're not going expensive-jail-crazy, I think you will find 16GB of RAM suitable.

Proceed with my compliments sir.

How much CPU usage do you typically see while transcoding with the 6100?

 

[Stux]

Any advice on the seagate ironwolfs?

They work fine for me. >=6TB are 7200rpm drives and run real hot. The 4TB ones are circa 5900rpm and are fine.

 

[LIGISTX]

They work fine for me. >=6TB are 7200rpm drives and run real hot. The 4TB ones are circa 5900rpm and are fine.

Yea, I saw that. I was sorta planning some 6 TB drives, but the value proposition of that isn't as good. The best bang for buck to get a ~20 TB usable array is 4TB drives still. I was hoping it would be 6's simply to reduce the amount of drives, but whatchagonnado.

 

[DrKK]

A lot of us are very angry at Seagate, because of those absolutely fecal 3TB drives they put out. They really lost a lot of market confidence there, and it'll take a few years to recover. I think a lot of us in the FreeNAS Community will have some time yet before we even remotely think about using consumer-grade Seagates for anything. That's just how it is. But that's good for you guys: Because of that loss of confidence, Seagate has had no choice but to put those models out at a slightly lower price than the competition, or else no one would buy them.

In fairness: I will certainly admit that the IronWolfs have been out a significant time now, and I am not at all aware that anyone has found them to be anything but more than adequate in their NAS. Maybe I will consider Seagate again, say, in 2020. ;) If there are no problems.

 

[LIGISTX]

Dude, I can't even tell you how many of their 3TB's I have had die on me. I think I had something like 10 of them deployed? Maybe 11? It was an old pre FreeNAS setup. A few were under warranty and I got them RMAed, some of their replacements failed... I believe I still have 5 deployed, basically in my current "shared" server, as the 3TB's die, we replace them with 4TB red's. So by the time they all fail, both vdevs will be 8x4TB red's instead of 8x4TB and 8x a mix of garbage 3TB's and 4TB's. Pool size increase ftw as well ;)


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[Chris Moore]

I run one of my systems with 16GB and you will probably be fine with that, at least to start. I have 32GB in the other one so I have some room to run Jails. If you decide to run more jails later, you probably want to upgrade, just to give yourself some room to 'play'.

It all looks good though. As you are assembling the system though, you might want to label the drives where you can see the label to tell you the last four digits of the hard drive serial number. It won't likely matter at first, but later when you get a drive failure, it will make finding the correct drive much easier.

 

[LIGISTX]

Also, to help understand this, do jails need their own dedicated disc? Can they be used on the boot drive? If they need their own disc.... I will need additional sata ports to throw an SSD in or something such as that. HBA card?

 

[Stux]

They can be stored in your data pool just fine.

 

[Chris Moore]

Dude, I can't even tell you how many of their 3TB's I have had die on me. I think I had something like 10 of them deployed? Maybe 11?

Where I work, we had many of the 750GB, 1.5TB and 3TB drives in among the more than 2000 desktop computers deployed in the network. Those drives all had some mechanical similarity and suffered the same (or similar) type of premature failure. We also had a large installed base of the 2TB Seagate Barracuda (the model just prior to the Seagate Desktop) drives which have had a low failure rate.
It has been my observation that the more recent Seagate 2TB and 4TB drives do not suffer the same design fault that the 3TB drives did. Further, I have run a set of 12 Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives in one of my two NAS systems until they recently reached approximately 45000 hours. During the time the original set was installed, I did have to replace five (5) due to bad sectors but I did not have any catastrophic failures. I replaced the failed drives with two Seagate Desktop drives and three Seagate NAS drives (still in 2TB size) and those have worked fine but the reason for that was to compare the function of the newer Seagate Desktop and the Seagate NAS drive. I do not see any functional difference in the performance of the Seagate NAS drive that would make it preferable to the less expensive Seagate Desktop drive. I got a deal on some Toshiba 2TB drives, so I recently replace the non-failed Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives that had exceeded 45000 hours of power on time, with Toshiba 2TB drives and they have been working but I don't like the stunted (incomplete) SMART statistics the Toshiba drives provide.
My other NAS is running 12 of the Seagate Desktop drives (mentioned above) that Seagate was selling a couple years ago. They changed the name and went from Barracuda drives to Desktop for the same model drive and now they have gone back to using the name Barracuda but the new Barracuda drives have some difference either in the hardware or firmware that gives them a slower transfer speed.
I have already purchased 8 Seagate Barracuda 4TB drives in preparation for moving to the larger size drive in the future. We have them in a bunch of computers at work and they have not given us any problems. I would suggest spending you money on the Barracuda drives instead of the Iron Wolf drives and use the "extra" money to buy a couple spare drives.
This is the best price I have found recently, I have shucked some of them, and it is the same drive as the "bare OEM" drive: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=SESTEB400010

 

[Chris Moore]

Also, to help understand this, do jails need their own dedicated disc? Can they be used on the boot drive? If they need their own disc.... I will need additional sata ports to throw an SSD in or something such as that. HBA card?

You can, if you want to, add a SAS HBA to connect you hard drives to, but I don't think you need to do that for your configuration.

 

[LIGISTX]

You can, if you want to, add a SAS HBA to connect you hard drives to, but I don't think you need to do that for your configuration.

Yea, I would do that if I end up needing to add more drives in the future.

 

[Chris Moore]

- update \ change -
This is the best price I have found recently, I have shucked some of them, and it is the same drive as the "bare OEM" drive: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagat...al-usb-3-0-hard-drive/5425900.p?skuId=5425900

It is on sale at the moment for 79.99

 

[LIGISTX]

It is on sale at the moment for 79.99

That is very cheap. I'm just not sure I trust consumer drives...

I remember reading back a while ago non Nas drives can drop out of arrays due to their firmware.


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[Chris Moore]

I remember reading back a while ago non Nas drives can drop out of arrays due to their firmware.

ZFS is not as bad about that as hardware RAID controllers can be, because ZFS treats each drive individually at a software level instead of trying to require all drives to perform the same at a hardware level. I had a FreeNAS running with six different brands and models of drives in both SATA 2 and SATA 3 variants (old and new) all mixed together. FreeNAS / ZFS never stumbled or ejected a drive.
I don't think you would have a problem and I know that I have not had a problem and I have been running those drives I mentioned earlier (45000 hours is over 5 years) for a long time and those drives were not even my first set in ZFS on FreeNAS.

 

[LIGISTX]

ZFS is not as bad about that as hardware RAID controllers can be because ZFS treats each drive individually at a software level instead of trying to require all drives to perform the same at a hardware level. I had a FreeNAS running with six different brands and models of drives in both SATA 2 and SATA 3 variants (old and new) all mixed together. FreeNAS / ZFS never stumbled or ejected a drive.
I don't think you would have a problem and I know that I have not had a problem and I have been running those drives I mentioned earlier (45000 hours is over 5 years) for a long time and those drives were not even my first set in ZFS on FreeNAS.

Hmmmm. I would like to try and find more resources saying it would be fine, and then I would likely do it. But I have always read on here that WE Red's are the key to success lol. The ironwoolfs being their equivalent I think I would do that.

But if more people can verify normal drives being ok, I'll buy those today! 79.99 is a crazy good price


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[LIGISTX]

Also I'm worried about no warranty at all from shucking them. Hmmm


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[Chris Moore]

But if more people can verify normal drives being ok, I'll buy those today! 79.99 is a crazy good price

I can't say I never had a drive fail in the warranty period but I just retired seven that had run without fail for 5 years and I have another 12 that are at the 2 year mark.
It is purely your option, naturally, and if you go with the Iron Wolf drives it does give you warranty coverage.
When I buy drives for work, I go with the Seagate Constellation drives and I have many of those that go the distance but even with them you have failures. Some of the drive shelves at work came in with WD Red drives, others came in with WD Red Pro drives and some even came in with HGST. I have seen all the brands and if you are really worried about failure, the HGST drives appear to be the least failure prone. Just in the past 30 days, I have replaced 3 of the Seagate Constellation 4TB drives, 4 of the WD Red Pro 4TB drives and 2 of the WD Red 4TB drives. There isn't a drive out there that won't fail, which is one of the reasons we use disk arrays to begin with, to mitigate the risk associated with storing our data on spinning rust. Just keep in mind that no array is a substitute for a backup and eventually your drives will fail.