NIC Advice

[IonutZ]

Hello there,

In an attempt to create the "perfect" NAS without reading too much... (trusting my IT experience)....... I figured out I'd give FreeNAS a shot instead of going with a Synology or other NAS system. I decided to use an older box (an Ivy Bridge i5 with 16GB DDR3 @ 1600) and bought 5x Hitachi Deskstar NAS 4TB drives. (And built my dad a brand new PC because the i5 was his).

So I figured... this will probably be plug and play and I don't have to worry about it, and it all fell into place perfectly, building it... then I installed it... and then FreeBSD didn't see my NIC. THEN ... I thought back to my network setup because I run a relatively complex network for a home/small business environment. I have a gigabit dual nic server running an older i7; one of the nics is external, goes through a Pfsense on a VM, one of the nics is internal, goes to the switch and services my network with DNS, DHCP, AD, etc.; server has an LSI 9750 with 4 drives in RAID 5 and I always wondered why my network transfer speeds writing on it were so shitty. We're talking somewhere in the 60-80MB/s range.

Needless to say, I started reading on here and saw some of Cyberjock's comments on a person who just like me didn't read very much... he said something along the lines of your setup is prone to data loss in the future, you don't have ECC ram, you didn't read the stickies. In any case, I kept reading and reading about people who used their onboard NICs and eventually switched to Intel NICs and saw the world of a difference.

So right now I'm faced with the following conundrum; I obviously want my network to fully benefit of this new NAS I built (and even the LSI RAID setup I have on my server). But going back to Cyberjock's comment... it's making me reconsider this whole endeavor if even after I get this NAS going, the platform that it's on (a regular desktop mobo with a desktop CPU, and non ECC ram) is going to lead to failure at some point. Some of the data that I plan to store on it is definitely mission critical for my setup, but at the same time, I'm going to have that data mirrored on the LSI RAID setup and it's being backed up in the cloud, so I think it should be relatively kosher from a "I'm-not-going-to-lose-that-data" point of view. But since I have 20TB which will probably end up being 12TB after going with a RAIDZ2 setup for double parity, I don't wanna have to back some of that data up, like movies, or music, or stuff like that. Is it something I should really be worried about?

Also I'm not exactly sure whether my switch is hampering performance of my network, I have an 8 port Netgear gigabit switch (regular consumer model), any ideas? Also I think that I'm running all CAT5e cables, but I'm not exactly sure anymore, there's too many of them floating around. I'm guessing I should probably recable my setup with CAT6?

I've been looking at upgrading all my NICS, and I read that Intel NICs are number 1. I was looking at an I340-T2 to replace my (1 onboard, and 1 pcie) nics on the server - which has the 82580 chipset. I was then going to supply my clients with Intel 9301 cards. Is there a better, more performing client NIC, that would pair up better with the 82580 chipset?

I really appreciate your time reading this noob thread. Thank you very much for your time.

Best,

IonutZ

 

[cyberjock]

You can expect backups to be corrupted as well with bad non-ECC RAM. That is one of the two reasons that I made that thread. We've had people with a second FreeNAS box that was nothing but a replication destination and his backups got trashed because when you trash the data on the pool that bad data gets backed up too. So having backed is NOT, I repeat NOT, a solution to the RAM conundrum.

I won't speak too much for Intel chipsets on NICs. The bottom line is that for desktops just about any Intel NIC is better than 90% of the onboard NICs unless you are buying a motherboard with Intel already installed. I refuse to even buy a motherboard that doesn't use Intel NICs because that's a sign of a model that was cutting corners.

 

[IonutZ]

Yup you definitely sold me on ECC ram, is there anything else I should be worried about, maybe when it comes to the network infrastructure?

 

[Ericloewe]

Yup you definitely sold me on ECC ram, is there anything else I should be worried about, maybe when it comes to the network infrastructure?

Keep it simple and do your research before trying something that's not simple. That works for most people.