Upgrading a School NAS

[Mike Hathaway]

I currently have 2 freenas boxes running intel Corei7 with non ECC ram. One is 5 6TB red drives the other is 5 3TB red drives. both booting off of 120GB SSD's
I am considering an upgrade. I want to do an inplace upgrade / migration.
I want to swap the motherboard to an ASRock C2750D41 with 32GB of ECC Ram. And move booting from the SSD to a pair of flash drives, and turn the SSD into a cache. The machines serve as backup points for our crashplan system via a nfs share not a local install of crashplan. They also service for imaging the computer labs. We are only using it as a fileserver and will use no plug ins.
So has anyone used this board in a larger setting then a home network.

 

[tvsjr]

You can search the forum for that model number and you'll find several threads. I'm not personally familiar with it; however, the Supermicro boards are far and away the most recommended boards for FreeNAS systems. I don't believe the built-in Marvell controller is recommended - you'll need one of the oft-recommended controllers (9211-8i, M1015, etc.)

 

[jgreco]

I currently have 2 freenas boxes running intel Corei7 with non ECC ram. One is 5 6TB red drives the other is 5 3TB red drives. both booting off of 120GB SSD's
I am considering an upgrade. I want to do an inplace upgrade / migration.
I want to swap the motherboard to an ASRock C2750D41 with 32GB of ECC Ram. And move booting from the SSD to a pair of flash drives, and turn the SSD into a cache. The machines serve as backup points for our crashplan system via a nfs share not a local install of crashplan. They also service for imaging the computer labs. We are only using it as a fileserver and will use no plug ins.
So has anyone used this board in a larger setting then a home network.

Yes, for a short while they were produced in a 1U rack mount variant that holds 12 drives. They're not super fast, but they're good at things like backups and secondary tier storage. Be aware that some of the SATA ports on it are powered by a Marvell chipset that is suspected of being flaky and problematic. Use of the Intel ports on the board is fine, and of course you can hook up an HBA to the unit for additional SATA/SAS connectivity. I believe that the Intel ports are the ones along the rear edge of the board (blue and white), not the front (all white).

 

[anodos]

And move booting from the SSD to a pair of flash drives, and turn the SSD into a cache.

Personally, I'd keep the SSD for booting. It's probably ill-suited for an L2ARC device, which you probably don't need. Since you're using NFS, you may benefit from a SLOG. The SSD you have may not be a good choice for this role. You'll want a small-ish SSD with good write endurance and power loss protection for this role.