Upgraded build, would like some input from experienced users.

[Christian Kråkevik]

As of today my box is running with 1 vdev in RAIDZ with 5x2TB Western Digital Green drives. With a total of 10TB storage capacity and 2TB running as redundancy. Overall I'm very pleased with my system but its running on a MicroITX motherboard with a dualcore 2.1Ghz intel prosessor and 3GB of RAM. Wich i know is not ideal, i got decent write / read speeds, and usually a transfer starts at 110mb/s and drops to about 45 for large files. The system is used as a streaming server for .mkv files, aswell as a genereal backup. It works fine, but when its under heavy load, lets say 2 users streams full-HD and one transfers a big file the streams laggs. And this is what i intend to stop with my new upgrade. I have loocked at the following hardware and would like some input about it :

New specs
MSI B75MA-P45, Socket-1155 m-ATX, B75, DDR3, 1xG3-PCIe-x16, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.0, VGA, DVI, UEFI
Intel® Celeron® Processor G555 Socket-LGA1155, Dual Core, 2.7GHz, 2MB, 65W, HD Graphics, Boxed w/fan
Intel Pro/1000GT Desktop Adapter 1000BaseT, bulk
Crucial DDR3 Ballistix Sport VLP 32GB K KIT (4x8GB) 1600MHz CL9 UDIMM 240pin (PC3-12800) Very Low Profile

I think 32GB of RAM would be the biggest overall improvement, but still im conserned about the processor beeing to weak? I read that samba ( There is only windows systems on the network) are single threaded and that a higher clock is better? Is it a way to share with another protocoll to use all cores?

Second question is : should i go with desktop hardware? Or should I go for a lets say supermicro mainboard? The NAS is already in a 4U server chassi, so the EATX would not be a problem. I do wont to avoid it, cause 32GB of RAM should be enough for a while? Dont you think?

Thanks for any input :)!

 

[cyberjock]

Yes.. I have been an asshole. Sorry. :(

Next time I shouldn't post when I've been awake for 5 mins.

 

[gibby82]

Lots of anger, etc

Dude, he is asking about his new build, which solves the RAM issue. Perhaps rather than getting angry, you should just accept the fact that not everyone is going to read every piece of material out there. Fact is, there is a LOT of info to read.

Don't know what your deal is, but perhaps a break is in order? Vacation? Relax dude, we're just people trying to get some info. Where were you years ago, when you started learning?

 

[cyberjock]

Ok.. so let me try to redeem myself for my attitude....

For home use, 32GB of RAM is a boatload. I'd recommend 16GB of RAM and spend the money on a beefier processor instead. My 32TB zpool has only 16GB of RAM and it can saturate Gb LAN easy. Also, I'm not a fan of Celerons but my i3-530 machine(different machine from the 32TB pool) can do over 600MB/sec and is limited by my dual Gb NICs. A Celeron may be able to kick out good speeds.

NIC is a good choice.

Personally, I only choose full size hardware because then you normally get more PCIe slots in case you want more PCIe SATA controllers later. Some people recommend ECC RAM. In your case, that means buying a different CPU socket motherboard and different CPU. If you want longevity for your system most guys recommend ECC. If I were building a system today and going Supermicro with ECC RAM and a CPU that supported ECC wasn't going to kill my budget I'd go with it.

USB3 won't make your system boot up any faster so don't look for that as a needed feature. I only saved about 5 seconds from bootup enabling it for my system. Also some USB3 chips don't work with FreeBSD and is why FreeNAS has USB3 disabled by default.

And since I've also ripped the head off my close friend's earlier I think I'm going to go hide from the world for the rest of the day. Apparently today isn't my day.

 

[Christian Kråkevik]

Acutally I read your guide, hehe. So maybe I should be able to answer some of the questions myself. As a quote from the guide "For maximum performance, more RAM is always better", and so does several other "guides" present.. so I assumed a 32GB set would just be a benefit. Anyhow thanks for the answer, I also did think about a LACP enabled switch, but those seems to be very expensive, and as far as I understand that would not benefit a single user transfer anyway?

Would the 32GB-RAM hurt? The budget is fair enough so I could handle 32GB aswell as a beefier processor.. Would I benefit from this? Or is it just waste?

The motherboard was choosen because of the price, and the DDR3 feature..it seems that almost every DDR3 enabled mainboard has USB3 so I guess thats fine. DDR2 prices are horrible and not dropping anyway so..

 

[cyberjock]

32GB won't hurt. Not sure how much it would help though. You could always get 2x8GB sticks and upgrade to 4x8GB sticks later if you think you need it.

DDR3 is definitely the way to go though. It's far cheaper than DDR2.