Parts check: 6-drive home setup

[KevinM]

Will be used for the usual things--backups, streaming media, iscsi for some virtual machines, cifs, etc. I thought about doing a smaller mini-ITX Atom-based setup and that probably would have been fine, but I figure if I'm going to have this thing for five years or more I might as well get what I want. What I want is 6 drives in RAID-Z2, ECC RAM and a decent CPU.

I found what looks like a pretty cool 6-drive case. The motherboard has 6 sata2 ports, so I should be good there. I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything important before I pull out the credit card. For example:

Does anyone have experience with Toshiba DT01ACA300 drives?

Am I likely to have heat issues with six drives in the LIAN LI PC-V354B case?

Anything else I should consider?

1 x LIAN LI PC-V354B Black Aluminum MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Caser
1 x SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server
1 x Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 69W Quad-Core
1 x Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 ECC Unbuffered Server Memory w/TS Model KVR16E11K4/32
6 x TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5
1 x COOLER MASTER Hyper TX3 RR-910-HTX3-G1 COOLER MASTER Hyper TX3 RR-910-HTX3-G1 "Heatpipe Direct Contact" 92mm CPU Cooler
2 x Patriot 8GB Tab Flash Drive Model PSF8GTAB3USB

 

[KevinM]

Trigger finger got the best of me. Just ordered.

 

[jgreco]

Just so you know, NewEgg has been offering the Seagate 4TB at $150 several times recently. Slower drive but larger capacity. I've got seven of them in a RAIDZ3 and get very nice (300MB/sec+) performance in a test setup.

 

[KevinM]

Just so you know, NewEgg has been offering the Seagate 4TB at $150 several times recently. Slower drive but larger capacity. I've got seven of them in a RAIDZ3 and get very nice (300MB/sec+) performance in a test setup.

That's a nice setup. I'd like RAIDZ3 but to get the 7th sata port I'd have to rethink the hardware to some extent.

As far as I can tell Seagate 4 tb drives are $189 right now. With the 3 tb drives I ordered I'm going to have ~10tb useable which is already more than I need.

My bigger concern with 7200 rpm drives is heat. The PC-V354B case I ordered isn't very big, but it does have a lot of fans on it. We'll see.

Newegg has a 5-drive limit on the 3tb drives I ordered, so the process of me giving them $$$ for the 6th drive is proving to be difficult. I'll try again tomorrow, and if that doesn't work I'll get it elsewhere.

 

[KevinM]

Just a quick follow-up for those looking for hardware recommendations. The hardware minus drives arrived last Friday. I assembled the system and successfully booted from the thumb drive. All hardware was detected without issue by FreeNAS. The drives came in yesterday and I created a 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdev, which is showing as 10.7tb useable. So far I've created some CIFS shares but over the weekend I plan to migrate my iSCSI LUNs to the FreeNAS box as well.

Install notes:

Lian-Li PC-V354V Case: The case is a very good size for a 6-drive NAS box and is well made. Space is a bit tight but with some zip ties and some careful arranging of cables the interior is mostly unobstructed. The front fans have blue LEDs which may be a little too colorful for some. I haven't cut power to the LEDs yet, but probably will at some point.

SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O motherboard: The board is very nice for a home server. It supports ECC RAM and has a nice bios that supports staggered spin up on all six sata ports. I probably won't bother with etherchannel but I am glad there are two NICs.

Intel Xeon E3-1230: So far I have not put the system under enough load to tax the system. But I like that it has a high clock rate for single-threaded apps like Samba.

COOLER MASTER Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler w/92mm fan: I read a review on Newegg that this cooler fits in this case, but I found that in the orientation I wanted, with the fan facing up, the aluminum heat pipes were just making contact with the power supply. I possibly could have gotten it to fit but decided to go with the stock heatsink+fan for now. If I notice issues with heat I will look for a new heatsink with a decent but slightly smaller fan. Open to suggestions there.

I re-used a non-modular 500w Antec earthwatts power supply I had laying around. According to this website I should be pulling ~305w at 90% load, so I should be fine.

Overall I am happy with the hardware. Thanks to all the posters here, including jgreco's hardware sticky which suggested using a server-grade motherboad, xeon e3-1230 cpu and ecc ram.