Second opinion on first build please...

[NateWoodruff]

After reading the build guide and other comments here, I'm thinking pre-configured used hardware is the way to go for me.

So from Ebay, pre-assembled and tested working:
SYSTEM SUPERMICRO 2U 6027R 12 BAY SERVER
DUAL INTEL XEON PROCESSOR E5-2660 EIGHT CORE 20M CACHE 2.20GHZ
MEMORY 48GB MEMORY (12X 4GB) DDR-3 ECC REG
NO HARD DRIVES INSTALLED( 12X TRAYS WITH SCREWS)
RAID CONTROLLER 2X LSI 9210-8I
SYSTEM BOARD X9DRI-LN4F+
BACKPLANE SAS826A
CHASSIS CSE-826
POWER SUPPLY DUAL 920W POWER SUPPLIES

This would take care of Case, Cooling, MB, CPU, RAM for $730 including shipping.

I would stuff this with 8 4TB or 6TB drives, the seagate ironwolf series is on sale at Newegg in packs of two. (The marketing on these say 1-8 bay NAS devices, can I assume that can be safely ignored, if I want to fill out the other 4 slots later?)
I think I would need to flash the two LSI 9210-8Is, correct?
The SAS826A back plane does not have expander functionality, so disk size should not be an issue... right? Would that apply to speed as well, SATA3 vs. SATA2?
System drive would be something I find around the house here somewhere..

Any obvious screw-ups so far? Forgetting something? Just a bad idea in general?

And for bonus points....
While I need my NAS to be a NAS, if it could replace my PVR machine, that would be nice. I think that would involve running a virtual windows 7 instance with WMC in order to utilize my cable card hd homerun box. Is this hardware in the neighborhood of that sort of extra tasking?
For an extra $170 I could get it with 96GB of RAM instead of 48GB .... worth it?

Thanks (a lot),
Nate

 

[BigDave]

Before purchase, see if you can google a PDF guide for the exact backplane installed. Check closely that the model will recognize drives larger than 2TB prior to buying. Also be aware that older hardware is power hungry and may be too loud for a home environment. Keeping 12 hard drives cool enough (below 40C) requires lots of moving air in a chassis like that. The small fans will typically run at 5,000rpm during periods of warmer weather. If you have a basement, a large number of members keep their servers down there and sound is not that much of a concern for them.

 

[NateWoodruff]

Just a (not so) quick follow-up.
I purchased the system as described above, with the exception of 64G of RAM instead of 48G, plus a $50 SSD for boot.

It does indeed FreeNAS. A few thoughts.

1. IPMI, where have you been all my life. Seriously, if you are thinking of stashing your server in the basement, it makes life so much easier.

2. The 4 TB drives are visible as 4TB drives, so no noticeable problems with the backplane. I do not know how to check the interface speed to the drives. They don't seem slow to me..FWIW.

3. The box is doing it's NAS thing, I also have a Win7 VM on it doing the DVR thing, plus Logitech Media Server. It's fast enough to do those tasks with 2 cores and 6 Gig RAM allocated to the VM. In addition there is a Transmission jail doing BT with OpenVPN running. I suspect the hardware is still far from being pressed.

4. The chassis had the fans set to "Full" when it arrived. Holy crap, that was loud (as BigDave pointed out). Sounded like a Shop-Vac full of cats... angry cats. Even stashed down in the basement, it would have been too loud to keep. Once I switched it to "Standard" (from my comfy chair upstairs through the IPMI client), it was just fine.

5. This was a used chassis. I bought it from the server store. There were a couple issues with that. The IPMI user name and password were set to some unknown values from the previous owner. And, only 1 of the LSI 9210-8Is were flashed to IT mode. The first problem was solved with a USB DOS boot drive with the SuperMicro command line tools on it for resetting the IMPI accounts. And the second required learning how to flash the firmware on the LSI cards, I used the UEFI tools. The only tricky part was figuring out how to deal with there being two identical cards in the system. Use "-c 0" and "-c 1" to refer to each card when running sas2flash.

Update: a buddy of mine ordered an identical setup from the same vendor after I did, and did not have these issues, perhaps they listened to my feedback.

6. This thing uses a fair amount of juice. According to the diagnostics in the dual power supplies (as seen in the IPMI client), I'm sucking down 165 watts at idle and around 180 when I'm banging on the VM. That's about $160 a year in electric bills. I saved quite a few bucks up front buying old hardware, but I imagine I may pay for it over the next decade or so.