G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 5, 2016 Share Posted July 5, 2016 Freenas Server question: I have a haswell based supermicro board on eBay that someone made an offer on. Should I stay with haswell sm board or get a skylake sm board(open box at the same price the offer was on mine)? 16gb of ddr3 vs ddr 4 doesn't exist since it's the exact same price. Only difference is a 6100t(I think) is $40 more than the 3160t I found and the skylake board can max at 64gb(not needed right now but I like the option to expand on it). The other option is to get another dual 1366 board and two low power xeons since that setup can handle 19*gb max(again,long run options). Opinions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 There were an awful lot of issues with Skylake. I'd stick with Haswell or get the Xeons. Latest hardware is rarely a good idea for the FreeBSD family unless you're a developer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Stephen Bertoni the only main issue I saw was the nic but supermicro has i210 chipset instead of i219*. I was going with a Xeon on the haswell board but decided low power i3 since all it is doing is file storage(no jails/plugins). Basically right now they both come out to the same price but the skylake cpu and board support 64gb ram and since I plan on adding more drive to it( have 4 getting 4 more) the higher max ram would be better (going by the 1gb for 1tb "rule"). Also saw bootable usb isn't supported but a low capacity ssd will do fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 There are other USB issues. And obviously graphics issues, which you're (obviously) not going to care about. I'm not fully conversant with FreeNAS but unless you're using ZFS on huge drives 16gb is a LOT of RAM and my guess is you'll retire the box before you'll need 64 gigs of RAM. Good luck with it either way. If you go with Skylake and you have time I'd be interested in hearing about how it goes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Stephen Bertoni yeah graphics aren't an issue other than boot up sequence but the board has ipmi. Freenas uses zfs otherwise you're right about 16gb being a lot. Haha. I believe it's 8gb as a base and then 1gb for every tb. I have 8gb on my current freenas box with four 3rb reds. Using those and then adding another 4 to the new build so total of eight 3tb drives. The board supports two x8 slots So my thought is two 8 port hba plus 6 on board so 64gb will work but unfortunately I can't use all the ports with that ram limit. I have another day to decide to accept the offer or not so I'm trying to get as much info as possible before I make a decision. Leaning towards skylake so far. The issues will be worked out eventually but they aren't huge issues right now. If I go skylake I'll keep you updated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 My guess is you'd be fine with 16 gigs of RAM even with 24tb of drive space, as long as you match it with 16 gigs of swap. I have an older, 64-bit Core2 Duo with 2 whole gigs of RAM, (4 gigs of swap) that does fine serving up files from 6tb of ZFS drive space. But if money's not an issue more is always better, and new stuff is more fun to play with! :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Stephen Bertoni I started selling gear I don't use much anymore and saved. Going less,bigger, better. Haha.I wish money wasn't an issue but then again if it wasn't my whole condo would become a data center. I'm going with raidz2 which is somewhat like raid 6. After "raid" I'll have about 12tb usable. I can use ssd for read and write cache as well as the boot drive. Pretty much every freenas anything says ecc ram which I plan on getting since it's a server board. Freenas is a different beast compared to linux(used to have a Debian file server but the 2tb drive filed quickly). And seems to be picky about hardware. I don't NEED server gear but I want as much data protection. I have thought about unraid and zfs on Debian but I've used freenas for so long I'm just more familiar with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Forgot to mention a couple ssd and 10tb point to point(freenas to esxi server). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 The BSDs are all good with memory management and FreeBSD is the best of the BSDs. If you want ECC then by all means get it, but it's not absolutely necessary. My FreeBSD file server has it, but my Linux file server doesn't and I've had zero problems with it. You're much better off with FreeNAS and ZFS. I'm impressed that the Linux community got ZFS working in general, but performance-wise, it's not optimal.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Stephen Bertoni hmm. Learned a little just now. I've seen Linux distros with zfs but at the same time, just as many issues. Hear Ubuntu has it built in now. Originally I saw an old systm video about freenas then the know how with Padre and Patrick so I decided to try it out. And love it, minus a few issues(jails). Freenas forums all say to use ecc which means server gear and considering it's not a huge price difference it's not a bad idea imo. From what I've read awhile ago freenas and zfs is a pretty safe bet for protected data. I have backups setup but even if I lost every thing 99% of it can be reproduced. It's mostly just storage with the occasional stream so my current machine works fine. There's just no upgradability. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 Adam EL-Idrissi I was going to say something rude about the FreeNAS forums. Instead, a couple of comments and a couple of links. There is nothing about ZFS that inherently demands ECC RAM. If this were job-related, of course you'd use it. But ZFS is fine with consumer-grade RAM. It's not so fine on linux IMHO but I don't have a lot of experience with it as of yet. As promised, the links: http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Adam EL-Idrissi Posted July 6, 2016 Author Share Posted July 6, 2016 Stephen Bertoni yeah the forums suck. Very few helpful people. I'll check those links out on break. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Bertoni Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 Adam EL-Idrissi tl;dr "Of course ECC RAM is better. But ZFS on non-ECC RAM can actually protect you better than other filesystems due to checksumming". "You must use ECC RAM with ZFS" is one of those apparently unkillable internet myths. Like "ZFS is voracious and will eat all your RAM" is an apparently unkillable myth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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