Will my hardware be supported by FreeBSD 8.2 / FreeNas 8.0.3?

[RamGuy]

I'm making the move from using my gaming rig for home sharing over to built my very own dedicated FreeNAS server. Therefore I need some recommendations and guidelines when it comes to FreeNAS and supported hardware as I have never used FreeBSD before.

Here is the hardware I'm considering to get for my 24/7 FreeNAS server:

Asus P8B-M, LGA1155 Intel C204 Micro-ATX motherboard
Link: http://www.asus.com/Server_Workstation/Server_Motherboards/P8BM/#specifications

Intel Xeon E3-1270 Quad-Core LGA1155 CPU

2x Fujitsu PRIMERGY 4GB 1333MHz, ECC, unbuffered DDR3 memory (S26361-F3335-L515)

LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i SAS / SATA RAID controller

8x Western Digital RE-4 (RAID EDITION) 2TB, 7200RPM, 64mb Cache in JBOD

Intel SSD 311 series 20GB SLC for FreeNAS installation



The plan is to primarily have 24/7 fileserver running Static Link Aggregation, AFP, SAMBA / CIFS, NFS, iTunes server, torrent client and FTP-server. I will be configuring the hardware RAID controller with JBOD and setup a ZFS system with my eight hard drives, but I have no idea which type would be most sufficient for my eight hard drive system?



What do you think of the hardware I have listed? How do you think FreeNAS should work for my particular system, and which ZFS setup should I pick? Might I be better of with purchasing a Qnap TS-879 Pro?

 

[Daisuke]

I recommend you to use LSI 9211-8i with IT firmware, the only LSI working perfectly with FreeNAS.
Using the Intel SSD for OS is waste of money and resources, use it as cache and a USB stick for actual OS.
You should definitely use ZFS RaidZ2, your performance will not be affected as much as you think, especially that you will use link aggregation. Data transfer on my setup through one 1Gbit card, while using RaidZ2 on an Atom processor:

Code:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/nas/media/tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 602.091800 secs (178335235 bytes/sec)

$ dd if=/mnt/nas/media/tmp.dat of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 363.791025 secs (295153467 bytes/sec)

CIFS reads from Network Drive:



CIFS writes to Network Drive:



I have no compatibility details about the motherboard.

About the TS-879 Pro, it depends what you want to do. Personally, I think FreeNAS kicks ass and it offers everything I need. I use my box to deploy MySQL databases to 3 Linux test servers, backup important development code and also all my media files in Windows.

You have a 10Gbit card on your Qnap but will you ever need more than 200MB/sec transfers? To me, using link aggregation is blazing fast... I certainly have the setup for it (using a Cisco SA520W-K9 and SG 300-10 mix) but I only use one nic on my box. Reading data at 115MB/sec is more than enough for my needs.

 

[Brand]

You can check your hardware support at the below sites.

FreeNAS Hardware Requirements

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Hardware Notes

 

[Daisuke]

First link does not give any hardware specs and in second link it does not mean the hardware is supported by FreeNAS.
For example, to my knowledge, FreeNAS does not includes the mfi driver.

 

[Brand]

First link does not give any hardware specs

The first sentence from the first link links to the second link I posted.

in second link it does not mean the hardware is supported by FreeNAS.

I never said that it was supported by FreeNAS but since FreeNAS is built on top of FreeBSD 8.2 it should be the first place to look.

FreeNAS does not includes the mfi driver.

I never said that it did. If you are wanting a list of all hardware supported by FreeNAS 8 you will not find one. Research has to be done and looking at the hardware supported be FreeBSD is the place to start.

 

[Daisuke]

Actually there are several thread started on these forums where people posted their working hardware. This is one of them.

 

[Brand]

Actually there are several thread started on these forums where people posted their working hardware. This is one of them.

You are correct people have posted their working hardware. Those are select incidents where people posted what hardware worked for them. While that does contain hardware that people have tried and is helpful that is still far short of being considered a list of hardware that is fully supported by FreeNAS. My point was that there is not such a list since FreeNAS 8 is still relatively new and that research has to be done and that it has to be supported by FreeBSD 8 before it will be supported by FreeNAS 8.

 

[survive]

Hi RamGuy,

Here are my thoughts:

The board should be fine...personally I would give the Supermicro 1155 boards a good look before you decide. Be sure things are supported between any on-board video the board has and the on-chip GPU on the Xeon chip.

The CPU is fine, any of the 1155 Xeon chips should run FreeNAS really well...the only thing you really need clock cycles for is samba for your CIFS shares because samba is single threaded so you need to consider if the extra $140 over is 1220 is worth it.

Memory should be fine, but the board should take tons more & ZFS loves RAM. I would consider backing off on the top end proc and going to 16GB of RAM.

I defer to TECK on the specific controller suggestion but I will add this: you want the dumbest controller you can find, the less RAID functions & such the better. If you are the ebay type you can find IBM M1015 (LSI SAS2008) controllers for around $75.00 that you can flash to a pure HBA firmware that should work great.

The drives should be fine, the suggestion to run raidz2 is a good one....that's what I do! No need to put the OS on an SSD it would be much better served as a L2ARC cache drive, but benchmark and see if you even need it....you might find the SSD will do you more good in your desktop!

Take a look at the Fractal Design R3 case...it's a nice cheap 8 drive bay case that does real nice as a FreeNAS server. Get yourself some .75M SFF-8087 cables & a pair of 4 SATA to Molex converters from Monoprice and you can make yourself a real clean install.

-Will

 

[BobCochran]

Ramguy,

I think an AMD Phenom processor or an inexpensive Opteron might give you plenty of horsepower at less cost than the Xeon, and allow you to put more money into controller hardware. I agree with the others that putting FreeNAS on an SSD is a waste of resources when a $5.00 USB drive is all you need.

My own FreeNAS server is based on an AMD Phenom processor, it has 6 cores. My guess is that it costs less than the Xeon.

Thanks

Bob