- Joined
- Dec 8, 2017
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- 442
Would love some feedback on the build I'm looking at.
I currently have a Synology DS2015xs backing up via rsync to another FreeNAS box I built pretty cheaply with slow drives and no ECC just to learn FreeNAS and give myself a backup machine. That Synology currently has 8 ST2000NM0033 2TB drives in single RAID5 equivalent. Goal is to get rid of it and move to something with more performance (seems to be CPU constrained sometimes), better redundancy, and something that doesn't make annoying vibrating sounds in my closet with the bays full (crappy case design maybe)?
I've currently got the Synology, FreeNAS backup box, and my workstation running 10gbe off a Netgear switch. Most of my current storage is large movies, and I really like being able to move them to my workstation and work with them very rapidly if I want to. I'm currently able to get about 700-800gbps there off the Synology via SMB and would like to maintain that level of performance.
I also occasionally use iSCSI on the Synology for VMs or other misc applications, but I wouldn't consider iSCSI performance super important to me - just a consideration that I don't want it to suck. It would be nice to be able to run some VMs from VMware off the FreeNAS box, but those likely won't be high demand.
What I'm looking at:
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-TF
CPU: Core i3-7100
PSU: Seasonic 650W Gold
Memory: 1X Crucial 16GB DDR4 2400 CT16G4WFD824A (Intent to upgrade later once prices come down.)
Case: iStarUSA D-400-6 with 8 bays hot swap
Was going to boot this off two sandisk ultrafit usb drives in mirror.
Aside from just storage, I will be running a few jails/plugins. I don't need to run VMs on it, or Plex right now, although it would be nice if I could. I can always upgrade the CPU later, but I assume a dual core i3 at 3.9GHZ is enough for now?
One of my questions is around storage config:
It would seem that RaidZ2 is my best bet for bandwidth performance and redundancy. However, I will definitely be needing to purchase larger drives this year, and I don't want to purchase 8 of them all at the same time. I really like the idea of doing 4 paired mirrors, and buying them 2 at a time to upgrade over say the next 2 years. The only other way I see to upgrade in chunks would be 2X 4 drive vdevs in RaidZ2 but that seems like a waste of storage and I worry about performance. I could do 2X RaidZ1, but when my drives end up being over 8TB each in the future, having to do a rebuild or in place upgrade will stress me out a bit with only single disk redundancy per vdev. I understand that mirrors would give me the best of IOPS (which I don't really need but is always nice), but how would they affect bandwidth for large files compared to one large RaidZ2?
The motherboard has 8 SATA ports which I think would be perfect, but if I wanted to boot from SSDs instead of USB or leave room for a SLOG or L2ARC (neither of which I think I'll use) I'm out of SATA ports and the case technically has space for 12 3.5" drives total. I'm thinking I could always get a PCIe SSD if it comes down to it or another SATA adapter. There is also the X11SSH-CTF with another 8 SAS ports, but for more money and I'm not sure how complex it will be to get the two storage controllers to cooperate together.
Only other consideration for me is that the motherboard and CPU are getting a little old. Coffee Lake supporting motherboards from Supermicro might be out later this year, and I could get a quad core i3 for the same price as the Kaby Lake. But, I'm not convinced extra CPU power is worth the wait for me, and not sure what features those new motherboards could bring that would make any difference.
Thoughts?
I currently have a Synology DS2015xs backing up via rsync to another FreeNAS box I built pretty cheaply with slow drives and no ECC just to learn FreeNAS and give myself a backup machine. That Synology currently has 8 ST2000NM0033 2TB drives in single RAID5 equivalent. Goal is to get rid of it and move to something with more performance (seems to be CPU constrained sometimes), better redundancy, and something that doesn't make annoying vibrating sounds in my closet with the bays full (crappy case design maybe)?
I've currently got the Synology, FreeNAS backup box, and my workstation running 10gbe off a Netgear switch. Most of my current storage is large movies, and I really like being able to move them to my workstation and work with them very rapidly if I want to. I'm currently able to get about 700-800gbps there off the Synology via SMB and would like to maintain that level of performance.
I also occasionally use iSCSI on the Synology for VMs or other misc applications, but I wouldn't consider iSCSI performance super important to me - just a consideration that I don't want it to suck. It would be nice to be able to run some VMs from VMware off the FreeNAS box, but those likely won't be high demand.
What I'm looking at:
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-TF
CPU: Core i3-7100
PSU: Seasonic 650W Gold
Memory: 1X Crucial 16GB DDR4 2400 CT16G4WFD824A (Intent to upgrade later once prices come down.)
Case: iStarUSA D-400-6 with 8 bays hot swap
Was going to boot this off two sandisk ultrafit usb drives in mirror.
Aside from just storage, I will be running a few jails/plugins. I don't need to run VMs on it, or Plex right now, although it would be nice if I could. I can always upgrade the CPU later, but I assume a dual core i3 at 3.9GHZ is enough for now?
One of my questions is around storage config:
It would seem that RaidZ2 is my best bet for bandwidth performance and redundancy. However, I will definitely be needing to purchase larger drives this year, and I don't want to purchase 8 of them all at the same time. I really like the idea of doing 4 paired mirrors, and buying them 2 at a time to upgrade over say the next 2 years. The only other way I see to upgrade in chunks would be 2X 4 drive vdevs in RaidZ2 but that seems like a waste of storage and I worry about performance. I could do 2X RaidZ1, but when my drives end up being over 8TB each in the future, having to do a rebuild or in place upgrade will stress me out a bit with only single disk redundancy per vdev. I understand that mirrors would give me the best of IOPS (which I don't really need but is always nice), but how would they affect bandwidth for large files compared to one large RaidZ2?
The motherboard has 8 SATA ports which I think would be perfect, but if I wanted to boot from SSDs instead of USB or leave room for a SLOG or L2ARC (neither of which I think I'll use) I'm out of SATA ports and the case technically has space for 12 3.5" drives total. I'm thinking I could always get a PCIe SSD if it comes down to it or another SATA adapter. There is also the X11SSH-CTF with another 8 SAS ports, but for more money and I'm not sure how complex it will be to get the two storage controllers to cooperate together.
Only other consideration for me is that the motherboard and CPU are getting a little old. Coffee Lake supporting motherboards from Supermicro might be out later this year, and I could get a quad core i3 for the same price as the Kaby Lake. But, I'm not convinced extra CPU power is worth the wait for me, and not sure what features those new motherboards could bring that would make any difference.
Thoughts?
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