fanchazstic

HBA - I currently have two of these. Whatever you get, just make sure it plays nicely with freenas. Freenas generally has pretty good support for hardware, but HBAs especially freenas can be pretty picky about. HDDs - I don't know much about the Deskstars and don't own any HGST drives in general, but I have heard good things about HGST failure rates. Just make sure that whatever you get, it is designed for use in a NAS/server with tons of vibration from other drives and has TLER. That really sounds like a solid plan in my opinion. I can't think of anything that should be done differently. One last thing, get a UPS if you don't have one. This is something that should go without saying, but especially for zfs, it is a must. Get one that can power the server long enough to shut down all the VMs with sufficient time left over to shut down the host OS. I have a CyberPower 1000VA pure sine wave that powers ONLY my server and networking gear. My desktop is on it's own separate UPS. Currently it estimates 17 minutes of runtime, which is way more than enough time to shut down the server properly. I like the CyberPower units because they are reasonably priced, replacement batteries are easy to find, and their PowerPanel Business Edition works with the consumer UPS models for shutting down ESXi (and it's free). But if you're just running linux, I'm sure there is support from most UPS models

if you're running freenas or zfs at all, get ecc ram. It is very important for the zfs filesystem. I am running freenas as a VM on my ESXi box with PCI passthrough with two HBA's. You can either get an old enterprise HBA and flash it to IT mode, or there are some relatively cheap sata HBA's on amazon that play nicely with freenas. That's what I've done and I can send you the link to the HBA's I use if you are interested in going that route. If this system is going to be important to you, go with raidz2. Raidz1 is safe, but rebuilding the array after one drive crashes puts the other drives under a heavy load and can cause another drive to die, therefore with a raidz1, you lost two drives and your data is gone. Raidz2 you can lose two drives and still be fine. It's a bit safer, but it's a tradeoff you can decide to make or not, but either way, you need to have backups. I'm not going to go on some rant about backups, you can make backups based on how you see fit, just make sure you are aware that raid is NOT a backup. As far as drives go, I only use WD drives. Seagate has been extremely unreliable for me over the years and I've had good luck with WD. Not everyone has the same experience, but there is a reason so many people over on r/datahoarder love the WD Reds. WD Reds are my recommendation. Stay far away from the seagate archive drives unless you fully understand what they are designed for. one more thing, your storage setup looks pretty solid, but if you want, you can use a share from freenas to store vms on. That way they are stored on a zfs volume that has some redundancy. Depending on your budget, I would start small since you said you don't have much data to store yet. Maybe get lie 6 1TB or 2TB drives and put them in raidz2. That would give either 4TB or 8TB of usable space right now, and you can upgrade to 4TB drives or higher later on. But in order to upgrade a raidz2 pool, you have to increase the capacity of every drive in the pool. So you would have to replace all 6 drives with 6 higher capacity ones. But what you can do is take the old drives and turn them into another freenas box for backups of the more important data from the main server

I don't think he's saying that the model of PSU is an unreliable model, but that yours could be unreliable due to a failure internally. If there is a possibility that the PSU is causing your problems, updating the BIOS would not be a good idea. Since we haven't ruled out the PSU as a problem, and is actually suspect of being the problem, updating the BIOS would be a bad idea. So nothing against that model or brand PSU, it's just that sometimes things do fail. Another possible thing that could cause the issue is maybe with the motherboard. Maybe a trace is broken and makes intermittent contact. Maybe a heavier gpu places more strain on the place where it's broken and causes it to become unstable. But to be completely honest there really isn't any more that anyone can do to help, with how little information is available. It seems you've tested all the easy stuff, so at this point either start replacing components like the PSU or motherboard until the problem goes away, or start RMAing stuff until the problem goes away. It sucks, but I don't think it would be possible to pinpoint the issue based on the current information.

fair point. I agree. Find a friend and steal his PSU to test if the issue goes away or remains

apply any bios updates. might as well make sure all windows updates are installed as well. My guess would probably be PSU too, but that wouldn't be possible to test without swapping it. So do a RAM test. Google memtest and try that. If a stick of RAM is going bad it can cause instability. Not sure about the artifacts, but it would be a good idea to at least rule it out at the very least Edit: I forgot to mention what's leading me towards psu issue. You said you have less problems with the 5870 and none with onboard graphics. The 5870 draws way less power than a 7950 and the onboard draws even less. Is your PSU properly sized (enough watts)?

yup everything is on a surge protector

That is actually not true. That is how a double conversion "online" ups works. The mains just charges the battery and everything is powered by an inverter that runs off the battery. They start at like $800 for the lowest models. Line interactive UPS's monitor mains voltage and only switch to battery power when the voltage goes either too high or too low. Those are the ones most people buy since they cost significantly less money

would a more standard line interactive UPS transition to battery power quick enough to help? I guess I might as well give it a shot because a UPS is a good thing to have either way

But it doesn't happen when the compressor turns on. It happens when it turns off. Also the fridge is on the same circuit, but on the other side of the room. Not the same outlet. Just the same circuit.

Ok so I live in an apartment and have a mini fridge in my room. I live here for college and of course as a college student I have to keep my beer close. Never know when you'll need to crack open a cold one with the boys. Anyway when the compressor turns off, one of my monitors turns off and my speakers pop. In my previous dorm each side of the room had it's own circuit, but that is not the case in this apartment. Since it happens when the compressor turns off, it's not a brown out, it's a spike. I don't want this to kill any of my expensive computer parts, so I am trying to find something to isolate the fridge from the computer. All of my computer power goes through one surge protector. The monitors, speakers, and the computer. From what I read online a double conversion UPS would be exactly what I need. But they start at like $800. Way outside my budget. Another option is a line conditioner with voltage regulation. I have read conflicting opinions on whether or not this will help, but seem like it could be a solid option. The last option I have found is a isolation transformer. This is something that I would plug the fridge into to hopefully isolate it from the rest of the circuit. But again not really sure it would actually help. Anyone who has experience with this, any advice on how you solved it or attempted to solve it would be appreciated. I like the idea of isolating the fridge from everything else instead of just protecting my PC from the noise and spikes it produces, I just don't know if it will really work.

i agree def don't need 32gb of ram unless you specifically want it for after effects or something ram intensive

so do we blame amazon for promising these sooner than they can actually get them, or do we blame the manufacturers for not delivering on time?

amazon still hasn't shipped my x370 gaming carbon pro. It was supposed to be released today, but it didn't ship. I might send them an email asking what's going on. my 1800x is supposed to be here tomorrow

What do you mean they didn't ship your cpu? I thought they had shipped that

My MSI x370 order hasn't changed yet. hoping it does soon Why did you get two cpus and only one board though?