Litmk

Also don't forget to check kijiji or Craig's list for people selling in your area. I found a guy on there local to me that sells out of his basement. Floor to ceiling packed with servers. I got a dual socket Xeon 3.3GHz 6 cores 12 threads (24 total) and 64 gigs of RAM dual PSUs etc. for $400 CAD. He even threw in the 8 HDD caddies for the hotswap bays. It runs ark servers and plex and nginx and postgres just fine.

I'm running two x5670 Xeons with 64 Gigs of RAM on FreeBSD with no problems. So I doubt it's a freenas or FreeBSD issue. Can you try booting up a live FreeBSD USB stick? Also those Supermixro boards need to have dual 8pin power connectors even if only one CPU is installed.

I know this is 4 years old at this point but I thought I'd post here in case anyone else stumbles onto this thread and needs the info. I bought a pair of Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U and they fit perfectly on the X8DTH-6F. Don't block the ram or the pcie cards. There is even enough room to put an extra fan on each. They came with the mounting hardware for the square LGA1366 ILM.

VDEVs are made up of individual hard drives. They give you parity. The VDEVs go into pools. Then on top of the pools you create datasets kind of like partitions. Eg. I have a pool with 2 mirror vdevs. Each vdevs has 2x6tb hdd. Which means I have a total of 12tb of usable space in the pool. I then create a dataset (partition) on my pool. I can set this dataset to have access to all the space or set a limit. If in future I want to add more space to my dataset it's a matter of adding more vdevs to my pool. So it's data in a dataset which is in a pool. The pool's actual storage space is provided by the underlying vdevs which are made up of hdds. Does that make more sense now? It's late so I hope I'm making sense... :-)

Raidz2 would give you half the space. I would recommend you go with mirrors so that you could add more mirrors later and only buy hard drives 2 at a time. You would set up 2 VDEVs of two hard drives each in a mirror configuration then put those VDEVs together into a pool. If you need more space later you can add two more hard drives and configure them into a mirror VDEV then throw it in the pool. So you have 4 x 6tb? That's 6 TB per vdev so 12tb for you. If you added another 2 x 6tb HDD you'd get another 6 tb so total of 18tb. Remember any one disk in any single vdev could fail and you wouldnt lose data. So if one disk failed from each mirror (vdev) you could replace them and not lose data or have any down time. Remember: you can't expand VDEVs (like a mirror or RAIDZ ) but you can expand the pool by adding more vdevs to it. I hope you continue on your journey. Zfs and freenas are so much FUN!