Supermicro Barebones - Will It FreeNAS

Dismayed

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I'm trying to make my first build relatively simple, so I plan to start with a Supermicro barebones. It will initially serve as a simple fileserver, but my son wants to set up Plex at some point - hence the Xeon chip.

Intel Xeon E-224G
Noctua NH-L9x65 Low-profile Quiet CPU Cooler
Supermicro Micro-tower Server Barebone 5029C-T
Micron 16GB DDR4 2666Mhz ECC UDIMM 2Rx8
Kingston-a400-120gb SSD Boot Drive

I already have 4 WD Red 4-TB drives that already have a Raid Z2 pool on them (Running Open ZFS on OSX). I hope to export the pool and bring it back up in the NAS.

Am I missing anything?
 
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sretalla

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With a pair of mirrors or 4 disks in RAIDZ2 (depending on your risk/performance profile) you should do well with that case.

You may find that ZFS on Linux will have newer feature flags enabled that will make the pool import as read only in FreeNAS, so may find yourself rebuilding with an option to change RAID types.

I did a writeup of the process to change out an existing array using a build of a degraded pool as an interim step a while ago... it may be something you're prepared to risk to get it moved over... entirely up to you.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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The case features two additional mounting locations for 2.5" SATA drives and space for a PCIe card. Add a mainboard with an M.2 slot and you can get 9 drives in there. See my Home NAS in my signature. I love this case.
 

Dismayed

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With a pair of mirrors or 4 disks in RAIDZ2 (depending on your risk/performance profile) you should do well with that case.

You may find that ZFS on Linux will have newer feature flags enabled that will make the pool import as read only in FreeNAS, so may find yourself rebuilding with an option to change RAID types.

I did a writeup of the process to change out an existing array using a build of a degraded pool as an interim step a while ago... it may be something you're prepared to risk to get it moved over... entirely up to you.

Thanks. I'll read your writeup on using a build of a degraded pool as an interim step. I have Z2 RAID in my current pool, so I'll stick the drives in the new box to see if it imports as read/write. And all of my files are backed up both in the cloud and on a local HD.
 
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Dismayed

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The case features two additional mounting locations for 2.5" SATA drives and space for a PCIe card. Add a mainboard with an M.2 slot and you can get 9 drives in there. See my Home NAS in my signature. I love this case.

Any advice on a CPU heatsink? I'd like to avoid ordering one that's too tall for the clearance available in the case.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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The Supermicro boards I used came with a heatsink. If it's a barebone you are ordering it will surely come with a heatsink.
 

Dismayed

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The Supermicro boards I used came with a heatsink. If it's a barebone you are ordering it will surely come with a heatsink.

I found this on the Supermicro site description of the barebones system that I plan to order. The CPU heatsink does not appear to be included.

Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 1.13.20 PM.png
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Sorry, mine came with CPU and heatsink included. Check with Supermicro or your preferred reseller.
 

sretalla

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Generally the hardware specs/requirements between FreeBSD 11.3 and 12.x aren’t different in the negative sense (a few more things might work under 12).
So your assertion is probably true.
 

jayecin

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I worry that power supply wont be enough. Remember intel TDP is measured when the CPU is operating at base clock speeds, so Intel TDP for that CPU is 71Watts and the barebones PC says it supports up to 80Watts TDP. Its very likely that CPU will pull more than 80Watts under full load/boost or it will be power limited and you wont be able to utilize the CPU 100%. Its also a 250Watt Bronze power supply, meaning peak efficiency for the power supply is going to be around 60% utilization. Not saying it wont work, but depending on how you are using it, you could be pushing that power supply to the limit and you wont have much room for expansion.

Is there a reason you want to go with a small form factor build? If its a space/novelty thing I completely understand. One thing to keep in mind for the future, Plex can be very CPU intensive when transcoding, you need a cpu benchmark score of around 11,000 to transcode a single 4k movie to 1080p (the current CPU is around 7,400). Now your CPU supports .264/.265 hardware transcoding which will greatly reduce the need for a lot of CPU processing power, however FreeNas currently doesnt support hardware transcoding for that igpu. Its coming in the future, but that will take FreeNas being updated to FreeBSD 13? Whatever the next big FreeBSD update is. As of right now, that system would not be able to transcode a 4k movie to 1080p on the fly with plex. If you dont have 4k content or only plan on streaming to 4k tvs it would be fine. The problem is if you want to give access to other people or someone starts a 4k stream on say their phone not realizing it, it will bring that server to a grinding halt and wont play very well.

I will also say, hot swap drive bays are cool, but really not needed IMO. As a home NAS i doubt you will be needing to swap drives ever, once they are installed chances are they will run for the life of your build. And if one does die, it takes a whole 5 more minutes to swap an internal drive. So if going to a case that doesnt have hot swap saves you money to get a bigger case, bigger power supply, faster CPU, room for a dedicated GPU etc, might be a good idea to look around further.

Otherwise build looks solid.
 

Dismayed

Dabbler
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Oct 17, 2015
Messages
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I worry that power supply wont be enough. Remember intel TDP is measured when the CPU is operating at base clock speeds, so Intel TDP for that CPU is 71Watts and the barebones PC says it supports up to 80Watts TDP. Its very likely that CPU will pull more than 80Watts under full load/boost or it will be power limited and you wont be able to utilize the CPU 100%. Its also a 250Watt Bronze power supply, meaning peak efficiency for the power supply is going to be around 60% utilization. Not saying it wont work, but depending on how you are using it, you could be pushing that power supply to the limit and you wont have much room for expansion.

Is there a reason you want to go with a small form factor build? If its a space/novelty thing I completely understand. One thing to keep in mind for the future, Plex can be very CPU intensive when transcoding, you need a cpu benchmark score of around 11,000 to transcode a single 4k movie to 1080p (the current CPU is around 7,400). Now your CPU supports .264/.265 hardware transcoding which will greatly reduce the need for a lot of CPU processing power, however FreeNas currently doesnt support hardware transcoding for that igpu. Its coming in the future, but that will take FreeNas being updated to FreeBSD 13? Whatever the next big FreeBSD update is. As of right now, that system would not be able to transcode a 4k movie to 1080p on the fly with plex. If you dont have 4k content or only plan on streaming to 4k tvs it would be fine. The problem is if you want to give access to other people or someone starts a 4k stream on say their phone not realizing it, it will bring that server to a grinding halt and wont play very well.

I will also say, hot swap drive bays are cool, but really not needed IMO. As a home NAS i doubt you will be needing to swap drives ever, once they are installed chances are they will run for the life of your build. And if one does die, it takes a whole 5 more minutes to swap an internal drive. So if going to a case that doesnt have hot swap saves you money to get a bigger case, bigger power supply, faster CPU, room for a dedicated GPU etc, might be a good idea to look around further.

Otherwise build looks solid.

I have been holding off until TrueNAS 12 is released and been patched a time or two.

I would like to stay with a smallish form factor, but it isn't critical. I'll tuck it in a corner of my wife's office, connected to an ethernet port. And, yes, I was a bit concerned about the power supply, so I'll spec out an alternative build, but only after I look at builds that other people have proposed.
 
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