My current home file server (with an 8 drive RAID10 array) is a Windows Server 2008 R2 box that runs Plex and Subsonic as well as does file sharing for my home network. It's no longer powerful enough (Q6600 with 8GB of RAM) to keep up with my media streaming needs and I'm tired of having a bloated Windows Server OS strictly for a file serving purposes. That is what led me to build a new dedicated storage server and what ultimately led me to this forum in hopes that FreeNAS would be my best option for a dedicated storage OS. And since I want this server to strictly protect my data and serve them up to computers and VMs I didn't think I needed huge amount of CPU power. But you're telling me different? Or are you just saying to go with a more powerful CPU for the headroom of being able to do more things in the future with it (something I won't need)?
Well, it's like this.. either you are CPU bound or you aren't. There really isn't a whole lot of room for "I'm cutting it close" as its difficult to guesstimate your needs(that's something you'll have to decide for yourself). If you want to run FreeNAS for CIFS shares
only a g2020 CPU is a great fit. It'll saturate Gb and it'll do scrubs reasonably well. Naturally, if your scrubs are CPU bound with a g2020 its not the end of the world if it takes longer, right? Even if you only got 80MB/sec instead of 95MB/sec during a scrub you won't be too terribly upset about it. But what if your CPU is so underpowered it takes 3+ days to scrub and the whole time the server is less than 10MB/sec without any plugins? Then you'll be pretty upset, and rightly so. I had that situation with my first FreeNAS server until I upgraded my RAM(I had insufficient RAM for my pool size). In my case a scrub would never complete before the next scrub would want to start, even with me not trying to access the CIFS shares. That's just unacceptable.
But as soon as you start doing things that have specific timing needs(streaming transcoded video via Plex, doing iSCSI and/or NFS for ESXi Datastores, etc) you are forcibly requiring a certain amount of CPU power. How much depends on your needs and what VMs will typically be doing, etc. That's only something that you can realistically guesstimate. Guesstimate too low and you WILL be upset when Plex can't stream a movie. Go too overboard on the CPU and you'll have spare horsepower(maybe even too much) and your wallet will notice more. It's a decision that you have to make for yourself based on what you plan to use the server for. Personally, I can't imagine an E3-1230v2 being "underpowered" for anything I'd want to use a FreeNAS box. Even if you installed every plugin we had and ran an ESXi datastore on ZFS its totally doable with that CPU. So if %randomuser% is okay with being fairly sure that they won't be CPU bound, I consider an E3-1230v2 to be an excellent choice. It has ECC RAM support, AES-NI, and is plenty powerful enough for anything I can imagine. In my opinion, its the ultimate CPU to buy if you aren't 100% sure of your future needs because of what it offers. AMD probably has something roughly equal but as I don't keep up with AMDs I won't try to provide bad advice for that.
I realize that the U-Nas box is far from ideal cooling wise. However the decision to go this route is not much of a decision at all but more of a necessity. I don't have the room for rack mountable hardware and while I could POSSIBLY fit another large tower it would go against my original intention of reducing the amount of huge PC towers I have in my office area (just sold my huge powerful gaming PC for this reason).
Its totally your call on what you define as "necessity" or not. Me personally, I'd rank necessity to keep things cool for longevity over size. But that is strictly a personal choice. If you want to build a hotbox with FreeNAS, that is totally your choice. As long as you are happy with any potential consequences then who cares if I wouldn't do your build. It's
YOUR build. Our(the more senior posters here) words of warning are because we've seen what people seem to get wrong regularly. And 99% of new users can't seem to grasp some of the basic concepts like "make sure your hardware is compatible with FreeBSD before purchasing it" and "make sure you have enough RAM/CPU power". Those are big pitfalls that many users underestimate because they have no experience with FreeBSD/FreeNAS. Plenty of people will assume we have some great agenda to keep the RAM companies and Supermicro in business. The reality of it is that you will rarely find a cheaper setup than some of the ones we offer. If there was a better set of options we'd probably be recommending those. We don't have any brand loyalty to Supermicro, it just works. Right now people are checking out
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/mini-itx-c226-haswell-build.15371/ as it might be a great alternative for many users. My only fear with the miniITX design is people are going to underestimate the cooling needs for their hard drives. Their failure rates go way up when you go at or above 40C. I have found very few cases I'd even try because of their lack of cooling. Most of them I wouldn't pay for until someone could prove they could provide cooling.
Therefore I'm sort of left with a real desire and need to go SFF for my storage needs and not exactly sure of the best way to get myself there. I realize that the vets on this board have the attitude that "saving money now just leads to spending money later" and that cheaping out is just playing with fire in terms of your data security. Just keep in mind this is not a cost saving venture, it's a space saving one. I know that I'm not in a position to go after the "ideal" or "optimal" setup for a FreeNAS server so with that in mind I'm looking for the best possible solution given my needs.
I wasn't under the impression that FreeNAS was an all or nothing OS where you either go full bore and do server grade EVERYTHING or you don't go FreeNAS at all. I'm hoping that's not the case but if it is I'll gladly find a more suitable solution for what I'm trying to do.
It isn't an impression, and it isn't a reality. There's some needs that have to be met for ZFS. It's not so much that FreeNAS needs it as much as ZFS does. If you go UFS you'll find that your RAM requirements shrink to almost nothing. 2GB of RAM is all you need pretty much regardless of your disk size with UFS. But, many plugins won't run on UFS. So there's tradeoffs. There's also a distinct possibility that UFS might be stripped out of FreeNAS along with the x86 going bye-bye a year or more from now.
The game is to understand what you are getting yourself into and what you will need for your system. There's rumors that Windows may have worked on something like ZFS a few years ago but bailed on it because they predicted major support nightmares because your stereotyped Windows minion will NOT heed warnings to add more RAM. They'll assume 8GB of RAM is plenty and they create support tickets when it isn't enough and cry that its slow and demand a fix. And Microsoft spends alot of money on support, so supporting things that might cost them significant support resources is something they must consider. I don't know how true/untrue it is because I don't work with Microsoft(thank god?).
Also notworthy is this... You are not building a desktop that, if it crashes or breaks, you simply reinstall your favorite OS and keep going. You are building a server and entrusting it with your data. "if it crashes or breaks" isn't something you should be okay with under any circumstances. Imagine if you had to wipe your FreeNAS server as often as you have to reinstall Windows. You'd never trust your server again. That stability comes at a price. You might save $1000 on a license of Window Server, but you will spend some money getting appropriate hardware(hardware that you should have probably bought with Windows Server but probably didn't). I wasn't building my servers with server grade parts until last year. At some point you'll have to start rolling with the big boys, which means money will need to be spent. :(
