I am considering the following setup (to replace a old/budgeted setup),
Mother Board : SuperMicro X10SRL-F (second hand)
CPU : Intel Xeon E5-2686V4 (second hand)
RAM : Micron 4X 16G DDR4 ECC MTA36ASF2G72PZ-2G1A2 (second hand)
NIC : Chelsio T520-cr
HBA : LSI 9400-16I
Boot device : Samsung 256G SM961 M.2 on a generic M.2 NVMe->PCIe adapter
Main Pool (RaidZ1) : 4X Intel DC P3700 (2.5" U.2) 2TB (house in a ICY DOCK MB699VP-B cage)
Second Pool (RaidZ1) : 5X 8TB WD DC HC320/520 or Seagate Exos (maybe 6X, it's still undecided)
Chassis : A short 3U rackmount chassis (~390mm deep) , placed in a 24U or 32U server rack cabinet
PSU : ~550W 80+Platinum ATX or dual 550W SFF 1U (with failover)
Network Switch : 8ports 1000BaseT + 12ports 10Gbps SFP+ (second hand, Chinese brand ToBeArranged...)
UPS : Undecided
Usage/Purposes planed so far : Main Pool for running 2~4 VMs (1~2 Linux, 1 Win 10, maybe 1 Win Server for now, maybe more with additional RAM added), Media server (Emby or Plex, 4 screens max), Nextcloud for mobile device data sync/backup, file server and other services (SMB mainly, SSH, TFTP, etc), Transmission or qbittorrent, FAMP, Drupal, LAMP in Linux VM, Docker, etc...
Second Pool mainly for replication of the main pool and SMB file server for hosting big files like BD movies, long videos and other no so important data, and mount points of plugins and devices of VMs also for large sequential files.
And the top reason for the selection is the fun and satisfaction of building a high performance and stable machine/systems by myself for less than $6k.
My questions and concerns are:
1. Is a SLOG device recommended for the main pool? Except for very short bursts of data, One Optane 900P will not outperform 4xP3700 in throughput. Giving P3700 has endurance rating @ 17DWPD and power loss protection, I would totally expect them to outlast a 280G 900P. Since persistent memory is not an option for the mainboard, is there any point to add a SLOG in this case? (By the way, can FreeNAS use PMem in AD mode or working on doing that?)
2. If second pool holds only data that I don’t care much about the reliability of (except replication of main pool; however, I do plan to replicate on other backup device as well), should I still consider SLOG for it? With a decent SLOG, should I expect performance gain using it for SMB server, mount point of a plugin, or device of a VM?
3. L2ARC make sense for my main pool? What size of a L2ARC would be good for the second pool?
4. Should/Can I disable swap partition on the spinning disks and do only main pool’s devices, or move the swap to system’s boot device? What would be a appropriate size for swap in my case?
5. The cabinet will be placed in my den at home where I do some web app programming with php, sql, js, py as a hobby, low noise level is important. If I use quiet low RMP fans (~2300rpm) for both chassis (2 in 1 out) and CPU, would that cool the rig sufficiently? This is also the reason I hesitate about dual 1U SPS, in my experience they tend to be quite noisy.
6. I am also getting an alternative Chinese brand U.2 HBA adapter. It’s a PCIe3.0x16 card with 8 SFF-8643 ports (vs only x8 and 4 SFF-8643 ports of LSI9400-16I). Advertise info are: Model # LRNV9349-8I, Controller Chip: Broadcom PLX 8749, single mode NVME only. Sticker picture shows the manufacturer as Linkreal. Anyone know anything about this card, chip, or maker? Between this card and LSI9400, one will go into my PC, the other will go into FreeNAS. If it only works in a Windoz box, the choice would be obvious. If it FreeNAS, is it a good idea to put in FreeNAS? I prefer to give the expand-ability to FreeNAS, but worry about its stability and durability. Since P3700 is capable of saturating 2 PCIe lands, should I expect performance gain? Is it typical for the controller to allocate 4 lands/port when it see only 4 devices attached? (BTW, this adapter is about 1/2 the price of LSI9400. Maybe that’s enough of a reason not to FreeNAS it?)
Thanks for having this forum and everyone on it. Sorry for so many questions and long post. FreeNAS is great! If there is I heart FreeNAS t-shirt, I would love to buy couple of them :)
Mother Board : SuperMicro X10SRL-F (second hand)
CPU : Intel Xeon E5-2686V4 (second hand)
RAM : Micron 4X 16G DDR4 ECC MTA36ASF2G72PZ-2G1A2 (second hand)
NIC : Chelsio T520-cr
HBA : LSI 9400-16I
Boot device : Samsung 256G SM961 M.2 on a generic M.2 NVMe->PCIe adapter
Main Pool (RaidZ1) : 4X Intel DC P3700 (2.5" U.2) 2TB (house in a ICY DOCK MB699VP-B cage)
Second Pool (RaidZ1) : 5X 8TB WD DC HC320/520 or Seagate Exos (maybe 6X, it's still undecided)
Chassis : A short 3U rackmount chassis (~390mm deep) , placed in a 24U or 32U server rack cabinet
PSU : ~550W 80+Platinum ATX or dual 550W SFF 1U (with failover)
Network Switch : 8ports 1000BaseT + 12ports 10Gbps SFP+ (second hand, Chinese brand ToBeArranged...)
UPS : Undecided
Usage/Purposes planed so far : Main Pool for running 2~4 VMs (1~2 Linux, 1 Win 10, maybe 1 Win Server for now, maybe more with additional RAM added), Media server (Emby or Plex, 4 screens max), Nextcloud for mobile device data sync/backup, file server and other services (SMB mainly, SSH, TFTP, etc), Transmission or qbittorrent, FAMP, Drupal, LAMP in Linux VM, Docker, etc...
Second Pool mainly for replication of the main pool and SMB file server for hosting big files like BD movies, long videos and other no so important data, and mount points of plugins and devices of VMs also for large sequential files.
And the top reason for the selection is the fun and satisfaction of building a high performance and stable machine/systems by myself for less than $6k.
My questions and concerns are:
1. Is a SLOG device recommended for the main pool? Except for very short bursts of data, One Optane 900P will not outperform 4xP3700 in throughput. Giving P3700 has endurance rating @ 17DWPD and power loss protection, I would totally expect them to outlast a 280G 900P. Since persistent memory is not an option for the mainboard, is there any point to add a SLOG in this case? (By the way, can FreeNAS use PMem in AD mode or working on doing that?)
2. If second pool holds only data that I don’t care much about the reliability of (except replication of main pool; however, I do plan to replicate on other backup device as well), should I still consider SLOG for it? With a decent SLOG, should I expect performance gain using it for SMB server, mount point of a plugin, or device of a VM?
3. L2ARC make sense for my main pool? What size of a L2ARC would be good for the second pool?
4. Should/Can I disable swap partition on the spinning disks and do only main pool’s devices, or move the swap to system’s boot device? What would be a appropriate size for swap in my case?
5. The cabinet will be placed in my den at home where I do some web app programming with php, sql, js, py as a hobby, low noise level is important. If I use quiet low RMP fans (~2300rpm) for both chassis (2 in 1 out) and CPU, would that cool the rig sufficiently? This is also the reason I hesitate about dual 1U SPS, in my experience they tend to be quite noisy.
6. I am also getting an alternative Chinese brand U.2 HBA adapter. It’s a PCIe3.0x16 card with 8 SFF-8643 ports (vs only x8 and 4 SFF-8643 ports of LSI9400-16I). Advertise info are: Model # LRNV9349-8I, Controller Chip: Broadcom PLX 8749, single mode NVME only. Sticker picture shows the manufacturer as Linkreal. Anyone know anything about this card, chip, or maker? Between this card and LSI9400, one will go into my PC, the other will go into FreeNAS. If it only works in a Windoz box, the choice would be obvious. If it FreeNAS, is it a good idea to put in FreeNAS? I prefer to give the expand-ability to FreeNAS, but worry about its stability and durability. Since P3700 is capable of saturating 2 PCIe lands, should I expect performance gain? Is it typical for the controller to allocate 4 lands/port when it see only 4 devices attached? (BTW, this adapter is about 1/2 the price of LSI9400. Maybe that’s enough of a reason not to FreeNAS it?)
Thanks for having this forum and everyone on it. Sorry for so many questions and long post. FreeNAS is great! If there is I heart FreeNAS t-shirt, I would love to buy couple of them :)
