I recently bought and modified to some degree a used Supermicro server from theBay. I wanted to post the setup here and hopefully get some guidance on the way forward. The system will be used for whole house AV media serving via a ReQuest media server (bluray rips and audio), as a Time Machine depot, and possibly for other miscellaneous household storage needs as they arise.
I have a 4 miscellaneous drives up to 2Tb that have been removed from a Mac Pro that has been upgraded but got more serious and picked up a total of 7 WD 3Tb Red's over the course of several months. In the meantime I tried and bought FlexRAID, tried the free Unraid trial (also bought a pro key but have not used it), and of course am now settling on the free and more robust FreeNAS and have been experimenting with it over the past few weeks.
The current setup:
Chassis: Supermicro SC846 -- 24 bays
Motherboard: Supermicro H8DME-2
CPU's: AMD Opteron Hex Core 2419 @ 1.8GHz
RAM: 64GB using 16x4GB ECC DIMMs
IPMI Card: Kira 100
HD Controllers: 3xSAT2-MV8 PCI-X
LAN: 1 of 2 on-board nVidia Gb ports on a Gb LAN
Two initial questions I have are about RAM and the HD controller.
The RAM I only recently upgraded because I was able to find one of the registered Micron DIMMs being sold on eBay for $10 each. The machine came with 4 1Gb sticks. When I populate the last four memory slots going from 48 to 64 Gb, the motherboard slows the memory down from DDR400 to DDR266. I'm not sure the slowdown is worth it but wanted to ask here before cutting the RAM back to 48Gb.
The HD controller supports 3TB drives but for the future will probably not support larger drives that come available. I picked 3Tb as they are currently in the sweet spot at lowest cost per Tb when pricing out through Amazon. But ... As I look to the future I want to be able to add to the drive pool with new vdev's made of larger drives or swap out the 3's when they need to be upsized and resilver. To that end I have been looking at other controllers that will support the larger drives. One such controller that seems to come up is the M1015 but I only have two PCIEx8 slots and would need three of those controllers. Another that would be neater and cheaper is a single LSI 3ware 9650SE-M24 card. Would there be a significant hit in performance when scaling up to 24 drives on a single PCIEx8 lane card?
I have a 4 miscellaneous drives up to 2Tb that have been removed from a Mac Pro that has been upgraded but got more serious and picked up a total of 7 WD 3Tb Red's over the course of several months. In the meantime I tried and bought FlexRAID, tried the free Unraid trial (also bought a pro key but have not used it), and of course am now settling on the free and more robust FreeNAS and have been experimenting with it over the past few weeks.
The current setup:
Chassis: Supermicro SC846 -- 24 bays
Motherboard: Supermicro H8DME-2
CPU's: AMD Opteron Hex Core 2419 @ 1.8GHz
RAM: 64GB using 16x4GB ECC DIMMs
IPMI Card: Kira 100
HD Controllers: 3xSAT2-MV8 PCI-X
LAN: 1 of 2 on-board nVidia Gb ports on a Gb LAN
Two initial questions I have are about RAM and the HD controller.
The RAM I only recently upgraded because I was able to find one of the registered Micron DIMMs being sold on eBay for $10 each. The machine came with 4 1Gb sticks. When I populate the last four memory slots going from 48 to 64 Gb, the motherboard slows the memory down from DDR400 to DDR266. I'm not sure the slowdown is worth it but wanted to ask here before cutting the RAM back to 48Gb.
The HD controller supports 3TB drives but for the future will probably not support larger drives that come available. I picked 3Tb as they are currently in the sweet spot at lowest cost per Tb when pricing out through Amazon. But ... As I look to the future I want to be able to add to the drive pool with new vdev's made of larger drives or swap out the 3's when they need to be upsized and resilver. To that end I have been looking at other controllers that will support the larger drives. One such controller that seems to come up is the M1015 but I only have two PCIEx8 slots and would need three of those controllers. Another that would be neater and cheaper is a single LSI 3ware 9650SE-M24 card. Would there be a significant hit in performance when scaling up to 24 drives on a single PCIEx8 lane card?