Yet another newbie building a freenas-box

[Ryback]

I have read some of the threads here with hardware suggestions and at first I went for this list:

4x KINGSTON Valueram/ 8GB 1600MHz KVR16LE11/8EF
1x IBM Express ServeRAID M1015 90Y4556
1x INTEL CPU/Xeon E3-1230v3 3.30GHz BX80646E31230V3
1x Supermicro motherboard X10SLL-F
6x Western Digital Red 3TB NAS-harddrives

What put me off was the amount of harddrives needed for a RAIDZ2-setup so I adjusted the list a little. The motherboard has 6 Sata-ports and I figured I could use four of them and set up a Striped Mirror Vdev ZPool.

The new list thus far:

4x KINGSTON Valueram/ 8GB 1600MHz KVR16LE11/8EF
1x INTEL CPU/Xeon E3-1230v3 3.30GHz BX80646E31230V3
1x Supermicro motherboard X10SLL-F
4x Seagate 4tb NAS-harddrives

It's a little bit cheaper, but I don't really need 12TB of storage as of now. Am I going in the wrong direction by dropping the M1015 and RAIDZ2 or should I be ok? Haven't bought any of the stuff yet, but my creditcard is burning a hole in my pocket. :P


From this thread: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/first-time-nas-build.14208/#post-68536

Some people have had problems with Haswell with FreeBSD. The v2 has plenty of power for FreeNAS too.

I wanted the haswell for the lower idle energyconsumption but if there are serious issues with it I will go the v2-route.

I tried searching for haswell-issues but all I could find was someone getting a error code 19 when booting, but that seems to be regardless of CPU/platform. If someone can point me to some info on what kind of issues people are having with haswell, I would be very grateful.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm very impressed with the E3-1230v2 I have. 35w or so idle with no drives. A little hard to expect significant savings there.

Searching the forum is currently pretty futile. "Haswell" will turn up different results from "haswell" and stuff. Real mess right now.

 

[Ryback]

I guess I should suppress my nextopian urge to have the latest and greatest and go for the true and tested. X9SCM-F and E3-1230v2 it is.

Is there any caveats when it comes to Striped Mirror Vdev over RAIDZ2 and using the onboard controller instead of the M1015?

 

[titan_rw]

If you have enough ports on the MB, they should be fine.

As far as striped mirrors over raidz2: Raidz2 is definitely better for data resiliency. Striped mirrors are better for random access speed. I'd strongly recommend raidz2 unless the server is exclusively being used by vmware for storage, or you have really iop intense databases or something.