Motherboard for a FreeNAS build

[Brother]

Hi,

 

I am in the process of building a NAS for myself, I tried out the interface of FreeNAS and I like it, because I won't do too much with it other then a PLEX madia server and Owncloud I am using only 2x2GB of RAM maybe if I see the need will update to 2X4GB in the future, I will use only 3xWD Red 2TB disks and that is all I think.

 

The case will be a FD Node 304 so mITX board, and now to the question.

 

I found this one:

 

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4844#manual -  about 75 Euro.

 

it has a Intel LAN and I can use mSATA for a very small SSD for system disk also it has 3x SATA 6Gbps so enough for me.

 

Is this setup good or I have to think of something else, is the board OK and should I get an i3 or can I go with a lower end Celeron dual core?

 

Thank in advance!

[GeneralBear]

rule of thumb for freenass is for every 1tb of hdd space its 1gb of ram if i am correct. im going to be doing a freenass build with a athlon 5350 (2ghz quad core) thats like 50$ and like a 70$ motherboard CAD with 4x4tb hdds and 16gb ram but a lot of people are sugesting the i3's i just think the way im planing is more cost efective i also plan on using a node 304

[Atlantisman]

That board is fine, the only bad thing about it really is 2x RAM slots.

 

For really any freenas build, if you're going to be using ZFS the minimum amount of RAM you should have is around 8gb, so i would think about getting at least that.

 

Going with a lower end celeron should be fine.

 

 

Edit: i have two pools, one running 3x3TB drives, one running 6x750gb drives. I wish i had more than 16gb of ram, it eats it all up.

[rustikles]

If you check out my signature, there's a FreeNAS build I did about a month ago for just the purposes you were describing: remote cloud-type storage and Plex. The one thing I found is that this amount of storage along with Plex will absolutely EAT your RAM. I started out with 4GB, and after a week of near 100% utilization with some glitchy transcoding, I bought another 4GB stick. 

 

The Pentium I have is more than enough to keep up with two simultaneous 1080p streams (most I've tested it with). 

 

As far as your mobo goes, it doesn't really matter so long as it's cheap and has enough SATA connection for your drives. ZFS RAID from FreeNAS is handled by the OS, so you don't need a RAID card or anything like that (in fact, it's detrimental to do so because of the dead sector detection of ZFS).

[Brother]

rule of thumb for freenass is for every 1tb of hdd space its 1gb of ram if i am correct. im going to be doing a freenass build with a athlon 5350 (2ghz quad core) thats like 50$ and like a 70$ motherboard CAD with 4x4tb hdds and 16gb ram but a lot of people are sugesting the i3's i just think the way im planing is more cost efective i also plan on using a node 304

 

I hope to safe the money because the i3 is 100Euro and the Celeron is 30Euro, according to what I know two cores should be enough.

 

That board is fine, the only bad thing about it really is 2x RAM slots.

 

For really any freenas build, if you're going to be using ZFS the minimum amount of RAM you should have is around 8gb, so i would think about getting at least that.

 

Going with a lower end celeron should be fine.

 

 

Edit: i have two pools, one running 3x3TB drives, one running 6x750gb drives. I wish i had more than 16gb of ram, it eats it all up.

 

I plan to upgrade the ram if it comes to it just I have 2x2gb in my draw so if I can safe that money too all the better

[Brother]

If you check out my signature, there's a FreeNAS build I did about a month ago for just the purposes you were describing: remote cloud-type storage and Plex. The one thing I found is that this amount of storage along with Plex will absolutely EAT your RAM. I started out with 4GB, and after a week of near 100% utilization with some glitchy transcoding, I bought another 4GB stick. 

 

The Pentium I have is more than enough to keep up with two simultaneous 1080p streams (most I've tested it with). 

 

As far as your mobo goes, it doesn't really matter so long as it's cheap and has enough SATA connection for your drives. ZFS RAID from FreeNAS is handled by the OS, so you don't need a RAID card or anything like that (in fact, it's detrimental to do so because of the dead sector detection of ZFS).

 

And now that you added the second 4GB how is the utilization? The only thing I am afraid of is that also everybody around says that the LAN needs to be Intel that is why I liked that board.

[Vitalius]

I plan to upgrade the ram if it comes to it just I have 2x2gb in my draw so if I can safe that money too all the better

If your primary concern is money, I wouldn't bother with ZFS. UFS does just fine and you only need 4GB of RAM for it at most (not counting VMs like Plex and OwnCloud), so you should be able to get by with 4GB with what you plan to do. 

ZFS' strengths are enterprise level features. If money is your concern, you will most likely never reach the point where those will be useful, so I would just stick with UFS.

I wouldn't even bother with the mSATA personally as an OS drive. A USB is just fine for FreeNAS' OS. If you wanted to get some extra performance, you could use that for cache though.

[Brother]

If your primary concern is money, I wouldn't bother with ZFS. UFS does just fine and you only need 4GB of RAM for it at most (not counting VMs like Plex and OwnCloud), so you should be able to get by with 4GB with what you plan to do. 

ZFS' strengths are enterprise level features. If money is your concern, you will most likely never reach the point where those will be useful, so I would just stick with UFS.

I wouldn't even bother with the mSATA personally as an OS drive. A USB is just fine for FreeNAS' OS. If you wanted to get some extra performance, you could use that for cache though.

 

Actually not that I am concerned with money that much, but from the CPU and the LAN alone that is 100 and more Euro. I didn't know I could use that for caching on freeNAS I will check it out. the main reason I prefer is the ssd is it will be more reliable, I know it mostly reads info from the system disk but still USB sticks are very unreliable.

 

Can I recover if the USB stick crushes?

[Atlantisman]

Actually not that I am concerned with money that much, but from the CPU and the LAN alone that is 100 and more Euro. I didn't know I could use that for caching on freeNAS I will check it out. the main reason I prefer is the ssd is it will be more reliable, I know it mostly reads info from the system disk but still USB sticks are very unreliable.

 

Can I recover if the USB stick crushes?

FreeNAS loads into RAM on boot up so it doesn't actually really write to the USB stick much. Most people suggest using a usb stick for the OS. 

 

You could use that SSD as a caching drive to get a  bit more speed out of the system though.

[Vitalius]

Actually not that I am concerned with money that much, but from the CPU and the LAN alone that is 100 and more Euro. I didn't know I could use that for caching on freeNAS I will check it out. the main reason I prefer is the ssd is it will be more reliable, I know it mostly reads info from the system disk but still USB sticks are very unreliable.

 

Can I recover if the USB stick crushes?

As @Atlantisman said, the FreeNAS OS loads to RAM when it boots up, so it literally reads from the USB 1 time. Then if you change any configurations, it writes those back to the USB when the system powers down, but that's it. In other words, if you get a half decent USB stick, it will work fine. 4GB should be plenty. 2GB is close but still enough.

If the USB stick dies, you can just install FreeNAS onto a new USB stick, plug it into the machine, then import the config files and the volumes for your storage. You can do all that from the GUI. To save the config files, you just go to the system page on FreeNAS' GUI then export the current configuration. It's a small file and then you just store that either on the volume on your FreeNAS machine or elsewhere. 

That's the beauty of FreeNAS. It's as easy as popping in another USB stick with the OS on it and importing the settings/volumes (as long as your storage isn't encrypted).

[Ahnzh]

For freeNAS you have to pay attention to some details. First off: are you using ZFS or are you not. In case you use UFS, 2-4 GB will do just fine, if you are you have to calculate in that you need 1GB per TB with a minimum of 8GB (official recommendation) + 1GB RAM (my personal opinion). In my opinion you cannot skip getting ECC RAM and a CPU/Mainboard as well if you decide to use ZFS. The problem is, that ZFS relies on Parity and Checksums. Having a problem there can result in serious problems and a potential of data loss. 
 
Using ZFS i would run something like this:
 

AsrockRack C2550D4I m-ITX Board with embedded passively cooled Atom server series Processor, you can put in a lot of ECC RAM, onboard 8 SATA 6G ports, 4 SATA 4G ports, 2 quality Intel i210 LAN ports, very low energy consumption and fully supported for BSD. Available for around 280 Dollars.

ECC RAM costs around 70$ for 8GB Kingston blocks (which are even certified for the board, model number KVR16N11H/8. You even can put in 16GB ECC RAM blocks. Huge upgradability there for ZFS purposes.

 

It depends on how much TB you want to build in it. 

 

 

For that GIGABYTE Board: first off you are heavily limited on SATA ports. 3 SATA3 Ports, 1 SATA2, a single LAN port, so no LACP LAG -> no failover, accessing to it with your computer for backups and streaming a movie at the same time can interrupt services. Adding a CPU to it would cost another 120$ for the q3/2013 intel i3 processors. Going with this board is like investing 200 dollars from the get-go. prefer investing 80 dollars more and get a board that's better, more suited for NAS uses, is far better to expand and well yeah, you get me i think.

[wpirobotbuilder]

Actually not that I am concerned with money that much, but from the CPU and the LAN alone that is 100 and more Euro. I didn't know I could use that for caching on freeNAS I will check it out. the main reason I prefer is the ssd is it will be more reliable.

A USB will be fine for your needs. However there is a concern regarding the drive: If you yank the USB drive by accident, you'll have problems.

I don't know if there exists a mini-itx board with an internal USB slot, but if there is you should buy that one.

 

Using an SSD as a cache will accelerate operations but can reduce performance. Both the system RAM and L2ARC act as read/write caches, but the SSD takes system RAM (1-2 GB of RAM per 100GB of SSD) to operate. This results in a smaller RAM cache, making it more likely that the caching will go to the SSDs, which are slower. This is a useful thing to add if you know that the amount of caching you need is well beyond the capacity of your RAM.

 

For instance, if you know you need to cache over a hundred GB of hot data, you'll have to spend a fortune if you wanted it all in RAM. You can trade off maximum performance for better average performance by adding a 120GB SSD, reducing your RAM by 1-2GB. Your fastest cache will be smaller, but at least all that data that couldn't fit in your RAM cache will not hit the hard drives, which are very slow. 

 

It's good if you need to cache a lot of data but don't want to spend the money on memory, or if you've maxed out your memory and need more cache space.

[Vitalius]

AsrockRack C2550D4I m-ITX Board

Now that... is a wonderful home NAS motherboard.

Link for those who would be interested in buying it.

[Ahnzh]

The thing is: even if your USB stick gets damaged in some kind of way, just get another stick and install freeNAS on it. there's just the OS on it, not even a single bit of Addons or config files. Those are stored via 'jails' on another drive, the same goes for the config data. that can be either another usb stick or one on the raid

 

recovering the system is a piece of cake in case the USB dev breaks. you could even build in a CD drive, boot the system from the CD and just have the config/jails on a usb stick or the ZFS/UFS Raid since the boot device is always read-only, even USB sticks.

[Ahnzh]

Now that... is a wonderful home NAS motherboard.

Link for those who would be interested in buying it.

pretty cool, right? was surprised as well when i found it! and what's more is it's not just the Mobo specs but the fact that it's competitively priced and got the CPU onboard already. PCIe 2.0 x 8 slot for expansions as well, I am utterly amazed.

[rustikles]

And now that you added the second 4GB how is the utilization? The only thing I am afraid of is that also everybody around says that the LAN needs to be Intel that is why I liked that board.

The utilization still hovers around 90-95% because I turned on some light compression, but it solved the transcoding issues. Any more than 6-8TB of storage and you might as well just get a 16GB kit to keep you from having to deal with the headache of buying more later.

 

Also, you can make configuration backups of FreeNAS from the webpage UI (in case your flash drive dies). Then it's just a simple matter of putting the OS on a new drive, booting, and restoring from the config file.

[Ahnzh]

And now that you added the second 4GB how is the utilization? The only thing I am afraid of is that also everybody around says that the LAN needs to be Intel that is why I liked that board.

 

intel is always the preferred way for freeNAS. But an intel i210 is the way to go in my opinion. it's from the server/workstation chip series. 

[Brother]

For freeNAS you have to pay attention to some details. First off: are you using ZFS or are you not. In case you use UFS, 2-4 GB will do just fine, if you are you have to calculate in that you need 1GB per TB with a minimum of 8GB (official recommendation) + 1GB RAM (my personal opinion). In my opinion you cannot skip getting ECC RAM and a CPU/Mainboard as well if you decide to use ZFS. The problem is, that ZFS relies on Parity and Checksums. Having a problem there can result in serious problems and a potential of data loss. 

 

Using ZFS i would run something like this:

 

AsrockRack C2550D4I m-ITX Board with embedded passively cooled Atom server series Processor, you can put in a lot of ECC RAM, onboard 8 SATA 6G ports, 4 SATA 4G ports, 2 quality Intel i210 LAN ports, very low energy consumption and fully supported for BSD. Available for around 280 Dollars.

ECC RAM costs around 70$ for 8GB Kingston blocks (which are even certified for the board, model number KVR16N11H/8. You even can put in 16GB ECC RAM blocks. Huge upgradability there for ZFS purposes.

 

It depends on how much TB you want to build in it. 

 

 

For that GIGABYTE Board: first off you are heavily limited on SATA ports. 3 SATA3 Ports, 1 SATA2, a single LAN port, so no LACP LAG -> no failover, accessing to it with your computer for backups and streaming a movie at the same time can interrupt services. Adding a CPU to it would cost another 120$ for the q3/2013 intel i3 processors. Going with this board is like investing 200 dollars from the get-go. prefer investing 80 dollars more and get a board that's better, more suited for NAS uses, is far better to expand and well yeah, you get me i think.

 

I know about this board and cpu, I think from Wendel but it is not available in my country I cannot find a retailer for it, tomorrow I will call to ask one company but I have little hope. Also it will be about 300euro and I will get a mobo and a cpu for 100euro also I will not be that heavy user to utilize the power, I will use it for backup and of my PC and laptop with Acronis for my pictures and home videos and for the movies of PLEX.

 

I am pretty much the only user that will make a dent in the usage the others will mostly watch movies and safe pictures.

 

The ZFS is a must I have very important archives that will stand on the NAS for years and have had files corrupt from time, so when Wendel made his video I saw the solution to my problem. The Scrub option is very nice also the snapshots a are very good thing.

 

I will look if I can get the ASrock but there are not many innovators in the more pro-sumer market in my country

[Ahnzh]

try to get it from another european country. Shipment should be easy, no extra duty fees as much as I know, just like 10€ more for inner-european shipment.

[wpirobotbuilder]

Now that... is a wonderful home NAS motherboard.

Link for those who would be interested in buying it.

Wow. If only the board could come with different CPUs, that would be an ideal solution for a ZFS NAS. It's got everything.

 

As it is, it's fantastic, and I'll definitely consider it. But if they had included this Atom instead of this one, I'd buy it right now. Eight cores is better than four.

[Ahnzh]

Wow. If only the board could come with different CPUs, that would be an ideal solution for a ZFS NAS. It's got everything.

 

As it is, it's fantastic, and I'll definitely consider it. But if they had included this Atom instead of this one, I'd buy it right now. Eight cores is better than four.

 

 

KABOOOM

 

 

C2750D4I

[Vitalius]

KABOOOM

 

 

C2750D4I

Ignore the iffy reviews on Newegg. It's mostly from people getting bad units. I'm sure an RMA fixes that really quick. YMMV of course.

An extra $118 for 4 cores is kind of a lot though... Still that board is epic. If I had the money, I would've bought that.

[Atlantisman]

Ignore the iffy reviews on Newegg. It's mostly from people getting bad units. I'm sure an RMA fixes that really quick. YMMV of course.

An extra $118 for 4 cores is kind of a lot though... Still that board is epic. If I had the money, I would've bought that.

When i first saw that board it immediately tempted me to buy like 4 lol.... Close call...

[Vitalius]

When i first saw that board it immediately tempted me to buy like 4 lol.... Close call...

Absolutely. That is literally a dream motherboard for any DIY NAS/home server builder.

Thank you @Ahnzh for making it known to us.  Am I the only one who is surprised/not surprised it is made by ASRock? I mean really. Of all people to put that much power in that form factor, it's them, and that many SATA ports on that PCB. 

[Ahnzh]

When i first saw that board it immediately tempted me to buy like 4 lol.... Close call...

 The vast majority of it's owners are really satisfied by it. took like 25 minutes looking up problems and stuff. Seems like it just happened that the newegg customers felt like they had to relieve pressure. they did that at other forums as well. 

 

 

Well, Asrock used to be awful some years ago. I actually am positive about them now. I talked to a repair guy in a computer shop recently. He told that while Asrock boards used to be low end (and their low end series still are) the overall quality got immensely better. The gamer boards are comparable to Asus ROG boards, the server boards are reliable and while 80% of board failures used to be from Asrock he didn't see an Asrock board fail for over half a year now.