Researching New Build

[ub3r]

Greetings friends,

I've visited the forum a few times over the last couple years out of interest, but have not been seriously interested in building a NAS until that lovely Black Friday sale a couple weeks ago. I'll be coming home from a year in the sandbox soon and wanted to purchase a small Christmas present for myself. That being said, I've purchased the drives (kinda went crazy because of BF deals), case and processor so far...

Purchased

• 10x Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• LIAN LI PC-D8000 Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case
• AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor FD4100WMGUSBX

Purchase Under Consideration

• GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
• CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
• CORSAIR Vengeance Performance 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory Model CMZ32GX3M4A1866C9
• 46M0831 IBM Serveraid M1015 8channel PCI E X8 SAS SATA Raid Controller
• SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card ( 100292DDR3L)

Now, from my understanding this build will offer me a hell of a lot of scalability. The motherboard has (2) x16 and (2) x8 PCI-e ports, meaning that in the future I could purchase another 3 IBM Serveraid M1015's, and the board itself has 8 SATA3 ports to play with. I think that's pretty nice and the cards only costing ~$100 isn't too much of a hit.

I've read that software RAID supports drives being pooled together from different controllers, etc. making it extremely flexible and allowing you to use different sized drives, etc. This excites me, as I've wanted to repurpose the growing JBOD in my gaming desktop.

Question: If I want to get 16 drive support, and my motherboard supports 8 SATA3 drives, I only need to purchase (1) 8-port controller card correct? ZFS will allow me to create a zpool with drives from BOTH the motherboard AND from the controller correct? Further, if I need more drive density, I simply purchase another controller (as mentioned above), flash it to IT mode and plug the drives into it, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, any input into this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your time.

S/F,
Dan

 

[tingo]

I've read that software RAID supports drives being pooled together from different controllers, etc. making it extremely flexible and allowing you to use different sized drives, etc. This excites me, as I've wanted to repurpose the growing JBOD in my gaming desktop.

If you are talking about zfs (and YES; you are)
- different controllers - ok
- different sizes - not recommended. Read the docs and FAQ.

ZFS is flexible, but not as flexible as the minds of potential users
Some background:
In zfs, storage capacity is a pool (you can have one or more pools, but usually one pool is enough).
Each pool consists of one or more vdevs.
Now, each vdev consists of a number of drives, in some form of redundant configuration (you can do it without redundancy, but then you will lose data when one or more drives fail - why risk it?), for example RAID-z1, RAIDZ-2, mirror or even RAIDZ-3.
Now here is the limitation in flexibility:
You can't add drives to a vdev. Nope - can't do it.
You can add more vdevs to your storage pool, but if your storage pool is, say, RAIDZ-1, it makes sense to add another vdev with the same redundancy; so at least three drives for the next storage pool too.
(Hopefully, I got this right, if not, more experienced users will correct me, I'm sure)

This means that you should plan ahead, both you initial installation and later expansion.

That being said, I find FreeNAS very easy to work with when making a NAS (I haven't used other functions like plugins, so I can't say anything about them).
HTH