surfrock66
Dabbler
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2013
- Messages
- 36
I have a very old very inadequate insane freenas setup that needs to be upgraded over the next year. I want to talk through a hardware plan so I can save money and spread the cost out in an efficient way.
Currently, I'm running a BIOSTAR NM710-1037U motherboard with a celeron dual-core 1.8GHz CPU, 16GB of RAM. The one PCI slot is a SATA expander. It has a Realtek RTL8111F NIC, which was absolute crap and dropped out all the time, so I'm running a USB 2.0 10/100 Ethernet adapter as my only nic. It's insane that it works as well as it does. The whole thing is a home-built aluminum rack-mount chassis I built myself with 6 drives, the OS runs on 2 slim USB flash drives.
I don't do a lot of work on this system; all of my applications run on other systems that keep the NAS storage mounted locally. My goals for the system are mostly just faster network performance and space to add more drives.
I can't afford to do the upgrade all at once. I am trying to plan out a possible purchase plan to gradually upgrade the system over a year. Big picture, I think I want to replace the motherboard/CPU/RAM (using the existing chassis and power supply), then the chassis, then the backplane.
I've taken a lot of guidance from this post: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/
Motherboard: X9SRL-F LGA2011 Motherboard (Ebay) ~180
CPU: Intel E5-2650LV2 10-Core 1.7Ghz CPU (Ebay) ~50
Memory: 4x 16GB PC3-12800R DDR3 1600 ECC Reg (Ebay) ~125
Chassis: Supermicro 3U CSE-836, comes with SAS836TQ backplane (Ebay) ~250 like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro...-2x-PSU-backplane-SAS836TQ-Rails/392593589520
I will then need a controller card for the backplane, but that can come later as I should be able to deal with my 6 drives without the backplane. I know nothing about storage controllers, so I'm not even really sure what to look for...all I know is I don't need the full backplane yet. Any recommendations for future planning are welcome.
Does this seem like a sane plan? Start with the MB/CPU/Ram, place those in existing chassis/psu/drives and run the OS off the same USB drives and importing the pool, then upgrade the chassis, then later add a controller card to light up the backplane with space to add more drives. If I'm missing something, or if there's a better cost-effective option that I may not have seen, I'm completely open to new ideas here.
Currently, I'm running a BIOSTAR NM710-1037U motherboard with a celeron dual-core 1.8GHz CPU, 16GB of RAM. The one PCI slot is a SATA expander. It has a Realtek RTL8111F NIC, which was absolute crap and dropped out all the time, so I'm running a USB 2.0 10/100 Ethernet adapter as my only nic. It's insane that it works as well as it does. The whole thing is a home-built aluminum rack-mount chassis I built myself with 6 drives, the OS runs on 2 slim USB flash drives.
I don't do a lot of work on this system; all of my applications run on other systems that keep the NAS storage mounted locally. My goals for the system are mostly just faster network performance and space to add more drives.
I can't afford to do the upgrade all at once. I am trying to plan out a possible purchase plan to gradually upgrade the system over a year. Big picture, I think I want to replace the motherboard/CPU/RAM (using the existing chassis and power supply), then the chassis, then the backplane.
I've taken a lot of guidance from this post: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/
Motherboard: X9SRL-F LGA2011 Motherboard (Ebay) ~180
CPU: Intel E5-2650LV2 10-Core 1.7Ghz CPU (Ebay) ~50
Memory: 4x 16GB PC3-12800R DDR3 1600 ECC Reg (Ebay) ~125
Chassis: Supermicro 3U CSE-836, comes with SAS836TQ backplane (Ebay) ~250 like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro...-2x-PSU-backplane-SAS836TQ-Rails/392593589520
I will then need a controller card for the backplane, but that can come later as I should be able to deal with my 6 drives without the backplane. I know nothing about storage controllers, so I'm not even really sure what to look for...all I know is I don't need the full backplane yet. Any recommendations for future planning are welcome.
Does this seem like a sane plan? Start with the MB/CPU/Ram, place those in existing chassis/psu/drives and run the OS off the same USB drives and importing the pool, then upgrade the chassis, then later add a controller card to light up the backplane with space to add more drives. If I'm missing something, or if there's a better cost-effective option that I may not have seen, I'm completely open to new ideas here.
