Hi everybody,
I'm looking to build a NAS for my academic research lab. It will store about 1TB at first, but needs plenty of room to grow. I have Windows 7 clients and plan to use CIFS, and expect maybe 5 concurrent users at the most, usually more like 1 or 2. I'm hoping to get transfer speeds around 100 MB/s on the gigabit LAN. Here's my plan:
Chassis: Fractal Design R4 Black
PSU: SeaSonic S12II 430B
Board: Supermicro X10SLL-F-O
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3
RAM: 4 x Samsung DDR3-1600 M391B1G73BH0-CK0 (yes, ECC)
UPS: Cyberpower CP850PFCLCD
HDD: Western Digital Red 4TB x 6 in RAIDZ2
General comments are welcome, but here are some specific questions:
1. I've listed WD reds, but I could likely save money on greens, probably enough to buy a cold spare. Most of the posts I've seen where people have used wdidle have applied to 1 or 2TB drives, and I'm a little worried that I may not be able to adjust the head parking if I get greens. Has anyone successfully used wdidle on a 4TB green or seen conclusive evidence that the ability to change the parameter has been removed?
2. I'm planning to use the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard, but I see that people often use an HBA even though the motherboard ports seem to accommodate the disks. Why? Might I have problems with speed (or other problems) if I just use the ports on the motherboard?
3. A similar Ivy Bridge build is about the same price, and much more well-tested in FreeNAS. I'd appreciate feedback on whether Haswell is sufficiently well-tested by now that I'm not likely to have compatibility problems.
4. Are 32GB RAM and a Xeon overkill for my machine's workload? I could save a few hundred dollars by going with the G3220 and 16GB, but I'd prefer to over-provision rather than under if there's a reasonable chance of a performance difference. No encryption or video re-encoding planned.
Thanks for any advice you have!
I'm looking to build a NAS for my academic research lab. It will store about 1TB at first, but needs plenty of room to grow. I have Windows 7 clients and plan to use CIFS, and expect maybe 5 concurrent users at the most, usually more like 1 or 2. I'm hoping to get transfer speeds around 100 MB/s on the gigabit LAN. Here's my plan:
Chassis: Fractal Design R4 Black
PSU: SeaSonic S12II 430B
Board: Supermicro X10SLL-F-O
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3
RAM: 4 x Samsung DDR3-1600 M391B1G73BH0-CK0 (yes, ECC)
UPS: Cyberpower CP850PFCLCD
HDD: Western Digital Red 4TB x 6 in RAIDZ2
General comments are welcome, but here are some specific questions:
1. I've listed WD reds, but I could likely save money on greens, probably enough to buy a cold spare. Most of the posts I've seen where people have used wdidle have applied to 1 or 2TB drives, and I'm a little worried that I may not be able to adjust the head parking if I get greens. Has anyone successfully used wdidle on a 4TB green or seen conclusive evidence that the ability to change the parameter has been removed?
2. I'm planning to use the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard, but I see that people often use an HBA even though the motherboard ports seem to accommodate the disks. Why? Might I have problems with speed (or other problems) if I just use the ports on the motherboard?
3. A similar Ivy Bridge build is about the same price, and much more well-tested in FreeNAS. I'd appreciate feedback on whether Haswell is sufficiently well-tested by now that I'm not likely to have compatibility problems.
4. Are 32GB RAM and a Xeon overkill for my machine's workload? I could save a few hundred dollars by going with the G3220 and 16GB, but I'd prefer to over-provision rather than under if there's a reasonable chance of a performance difference. No encryption or video re-encoding planned.
Thanks for any advice you have!
