G+_Matt Antes Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 Just re-watched KH78 and I'm ready to build a new FreeNAS box. But I can't decide on buying something more pro-grade like a SuperMicro server case, with redundant PSU and SuperMicro motherboard versus saving a bunch of money and using a consumer grade case, standard PSU and ASUS motherboard. Planning for something with 8 drives to start and expandable to 16. Can someone convince me of one way or the other? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Lucas Van Enger Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 I love my FreeNAS box. I used an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ on an ASUS board with 4GB of ram and 4 SATA ports threw a few Seagate laptop drives of different sizes into HP case and the thing has been running bullet proof for almost a year. Only issue I had was a loose cable after moving. As far as for your case goes... If you have a Frys Electronics near you I would check out their selection. They generally have a good variety of NAS friendly cases with easy access drive bays for around $120... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 matt antes I'd check out server grade hardware, Supermicro and ASUS both make good server motherboards for what you want to do. I doubt any are going to have 16 ports built in, but that's what HBA cards are made for. Even if you have to get a little slower parts due to budget, a server grade motherboard with ECC memory will make a huge difference in stability of your NAS box. A low end Xenon/Opteron and ECC memory really won't be that much more than the desktop equivalents. Also, with 16 drives if you use 4TB RED/NAS drives a RAIDZ2 will have ~50% chance to have 2 drives have a read error on a rebuild. So I'll say it again, mirrored arrays are just better. You could use RAIDZ3, but that'll be as slow as molasses in the middle of winter (trust me, it'd take all day for the molasses to load into the mixer at the feed plant my grandfather owned.) FreeNAS hasn't really caught up with the times with this particular problem yet, so the only way you have to make a RAID 10 is to start out by assigning only 2 drives to a volume and then adding 2 drives a time till they're all in a single volume. One of the best explanations on RAID 5 and what actually causes problems with it (note, it's not evil and does have a place, just not on large arrays of spinning platters of rust.) http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2012/08/i-come-not-to-praise-raid-5/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_610GARAGE Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 I would also suggest server grade hardware, but would not suggest redundant power supplies. Personally, I think that for home/small office applications, redundant power supplies are a waste of money. They use more power, extremely loud, and are much more expensive. Unless you need something like 99.999 uptime, just keep a spare power supply. Yes, this could mean that the power supply fails at just the right moment and corrupts the drive, but how likely would that really be? Also, I would suggest getting used server hardware. It does come with some risk, but you can get a very powerful system for little money. For may nas, I got two LGA 771 xeon cpus ($50 each) and a supermicro board ($150) from serversupply.com and ram (around $130 for 8 4GB sticks) off of ebay. I also got two lsi raid cards (around $100) that I flashed to an hba card, and a 12 hot swappable rackmount server case (around $70 before shipping) on ebay. You do have to stress test parts before use. However, serversupply does have warranties. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 You could also go with something from www.xbyte.com or www.stikc.com. Both include a 1 year warranty at the least, and you can pickup everything but the hard drives for ~$600, just be sure to have them include all the spare HD rails when ordering. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Matt Antes Posted November 1, 2014 Author Share Posted November 1, 2014 Thanks for the insights, I was originally thinking about getting a refurbished Supermicro 3U 16bay server case with redundant PSUs off eBay... but now I'm leaning towards a new Norco case and running a traditional PSU, both for noise reasons and easy/cost of finding parts in the future. My plans for drives are buy 8x4TB red drives first and set those up. Then once all my files are all moved over to that array, add my current/old array of 8x2TB drives in the remaining 8 bays, as a second and separate volume. I've been running RAID6 for several years without a hiccup... Is RAIDZ2 still going to be the best way to go for a 8x4TB array? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted November 2, 2014 Share Posted November 2, 2014 matt antes RAIDZ2 (RAID 6 by any other name), should be ok for a 16TB array. It would most likely not be ok on a 32TB. If you really want to get into the details I have a BUNCH of links from a trusted source here for you to look at. http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/12/the-history-of-array-splitting http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/one-big-raid-10-a-new-standard-in-server-storage http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-raid-for-hard-drives-in-2013 http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-level-by-drive-count http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/hardware-and-software-raid http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/08/nearly-as-good-is-not-better http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/07/hot-spare-or-a-hot-mess http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/05/when-no-redundancy-is-more-reliable http://www.smbitjournal.com/2011/09/spotlight-on-smb-storage http://www.smbitjournal.com/2013/06/dreaded-array-confusion http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/805 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1670144 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted November 2, 2014 Share Posted November 2, 2014 matt antes? If your planning to run a large scale FreeNAS box, I'd definitely look in to ECC RAM. If you have a smaller budget, I'd look at an AMD FX processor. They still have support for ECC RAM without having to pay for server class parts. You have to make sure the motherboard supports ECC too. I'd look at the Asus motherboards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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