Dell Poweredge T110 II as a NAS

[jkosyr]

I am a professional Photographer looking to Upgrade my current Storage solution.

 

I recently got my hands on an old Dell Poweredge T110 ii Server with  PERC H200 Adapter RAID 6gb Sas/Sata 4 by 2 Raid card (8 drives total), Intel Xeon E3-1220v2 3.10 GHz, 8M Cache, Turbo, Quad Core/4T (69W) and 16 gb Ram. (For Free)  

 

Would this system be good as a NAS and what else should I do if it is.  It only has a 400 Watt psu in it currently. 

 

I have 6 x 10 TB  Seagate IronWolf SATA HD's HD's that I got for a really good deal over the holiday season.  

Is there anything else I should be looking at installing into the system other than a SSD on one of the Board Sata ports for a boot drive?

I have 1 Full size PCIE Gen 2 8x slot

1  PCIE Gen 2 4x slot

1 PCIE Gen 2 1x slot

Onboard 1x1gb Network port

 

I want to keep the total cost for this NAS down as much as I can but at the same time I am willing to make the investment where needed (If I can't get something donated or find it 2nd hand) to get the best performance I can.

I am looking for both performance and Fault tolerance as well so I am considering freeNas or unraid for the OS.

 

 Things I am also considering are a new / used case / (rack mount is okay as I do have a full sized Rack)

 

Suggestions are welcome.

 

Thanks,

Jack

 

[Windows7ge]

With a pre-build server like this there not much to go over as most of the work is already done but...

1. If you want to go with FreeNAS remove the RAID controller and install an HBA. Do not use Hardware RAID with FreeNAS.
2. Consider installing a 10Gbit NIC to move projects to/from the server faster. It may even allow seemless editing directly off the server.
3. Consider adding more RAM. The rules outlined for ZFS and how much RAM it needs are not accurate but if you have a lot of files to store more RAM will allow you to read the files faster (RAM cache).

[seagate_surfer]

I went ahead and checked the PowerEdge T110 II Technical Guide to know what was originlly there and it originally had a 305w PSU and a 6 HDD configuration, so the upgrade seems to be done already, and as mentioned above consider the 10Gbit NIC installation...

[jkosyr]

13 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

With a pre-build server like this there not much to go over as most of the work is already done but...

1. If you want to go with FreeNAS remove the RAID controller and install an HBA. Do not use Hardware RAID with FreeNAS.
2. Consider installing a 10Gbit NIC to move projects to/from the server faster. It may even allow seemless editing directly off the server.
3. Consider adding more RAM. The rules outlined for ZFS and how much RAM it needs are not accurate but if you have a lot of files to store more RAM will allow you to read the files faster (RAM cache).

When you say remove the Raid controller and install an HBA the PERC H200 is a HBA from what I understand where you can format each of the drives independently without using the raid functionality.  If removing the raid controller what HBA would you recommend putting in as the system only has 4 SATA connectors on board.

As for the RAM I was considering upgrading it to the max of 32 GB but not sure how much that would help.

 

[AbsoluteFool]

46 minutes ago, jkosyr said:

When you say remove the Raid controller and install an HBA the PERC H200 is a HBA from what I understand where you can format each of the drives independently without using the raid functionality.  If removing the raid controller what HBA would you recommend putting in as the system only has 4 SATA connectors on board.

As for the RAM I was considering upgrading it to the max of 32 GB but not sure how much that would help.

 

Formating each drive independantly is something every raid controller can do. It doesen't make it a HBA. A HBA will simple just see the drives, and present them as if they where connected to regulare SATA data cables. A RAID controller need to be told to use the disks, or they wont be presented to the OS.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, jkosyr said:

When you say remove the Raid controller and install an HBA the PERC H200 is a HBA from what I understand where you can format each of the drives independently without using the raid functionality.  If removing the raid controller what HBA would you recommend putting in as the system only has 4 SATA connectors on board.

As for the RAM I was considering upgrading it to the max of 32 GB but not sure how much that would help.

 

As AbsoluteFool explained there are RAID controllers and then there are HBAs. An HBA does not have RAID functionality and for an OS like FreeNAS which uses a Software RAID implimentation you don't want to use a RAID controller. I can't say with confidence that leaving the RAID card unconfigured is just as good as an HBA so I wouldn't risk it.

 

As for HBA alternitives. If you need 8 ports (SASII/SATAIII) I recommend the LSI 9207-8i. It's a solid HBA. You can find it for as low as $50. If you need more than 8 ports I can recommend the LSI 9201-16i. Again SASII/SATAIII but with 16 ports. You can find it for a little over $100 if you look around enough.

 

If you have large files that you plan to frequent it will enable you to read them off the server very quickly thanks to the RAM cache (if you use FreeNAS). Add 10Gbit networking to the mix and you could easily saturate the link (~1.123GB/s) during read operations if the destination device is capable of it.

[jkosyr]

1 hour ago, Windows7ge said:

As AbsoluteFool explained there are RAID controllers and then there are HBAs. An HBA does not have RAID functionality and for an OS like FreeNAS which uses a Software RAID implimentation you don't want to use a RAID controller. I can't say with confidence that leaving the RAID card unconfigured is just as good as an HBA so I wouldn't risk it.

 

As for HBA alternitives. If you need 8 ports (SASII/SATAIII) I recommend the LSI 9207-8i. It's a solid HBA. You can find it for as low as $50. If you need more than 8 ports I can recommend the LSI 9201-16i. Again SASII/SATAIII but with 16 ports. You can find it for a little over $100 if you look around enough.

 

If you have large files that you plan to frequent it will enable you to read them off the server very quickly thanks to the RAM cache (if you use FreeNAS). Add 10Gbit networking to the mix and you could easily saturate the link (~1.123GB/s) during read operations if the destination device is capable of it.

Thanks for that info.  I defiantly want the ability to have expandability which was why I was asking to see if I should bother with this server or look at spending a couple hundred on a better board/processor + More ram rather than fuss with an outdated system and just put it all in a rack mountable enclosure with a larger psu than what this has.  As for the file size I am working on Raw photos from a Canon 5dm3 and 5dm4 no video so file sizes are generally under 700MB with Raw's being a tiny fraction in comparison to the Adobe files for edits.  I currently have 2 8 tb external drives full which is why I was looking at the server route rather than just keep getting externals.  

 

in theory I was looking at having 2 out of the 6 drives I have as failover using the other 4 as a start.

 

Thanks

[Windows7ge]

10 minutes ago, jkosyr said:

Thanks for that info.  I defiantly want the ability to have expandability which was why I was asking to see if I should bother with this server or look at spending a couple hundred on a better board/processor + More ram rather than fuss with an outdated system and just put it all in a rack mountable enclosure with a larger psu than what this has.  As for the file size I am working on Raw photos from a Canon 5dm3 and 5dm4 no video so file sizes are generally under 700MB with Raw's being a tiny fraction in comparison to the Adobe files for edits.  I currently have 2 8 tb external drives full which is why I was looking at the server route rather than just keep getting externals.  

 

in theory I was looking at having 2 out of the 6 drives I have as failover using the other 4 as a start.

 

Thanks

I would go for a NAS/File Server over local storage here if you need more freedom of access to the files.

 

If you're copying multiple of those at once it'll go quick. FreeNAS does have the downside of to expand the pool you have to append Datasets. Lets say you start out with a 3 drive RAID5. 1 drive can fail and all your data is still there. You can buy 3 more drives and make another 3 drive RAID5 and append it's dataset to the original. You then have 4 drives of usable storage and you can lose 1 disk from either dataset before losing data.

 

Similar with RAID6 or RAID 10. That's how FreeNAS operates which is where unRAID does have the upperhand. If you want REALLY easy adding of storage that would be the better way to go. UnRAID supports single disk addition. A feature FreeNAS/ZFS has not implemented yet to my knowledge where you can just pop in 1 or more disks at your leisure to expand the pool. They don't have to be matching capacity either.

[miles5600]

On 1/8/2020 at 12:30 AM, jkosyr said:

Thanks for that info.  I defiantly want the ability to have expandability which was why I was asking to see if I should bother with this server or look at spending a couple hundred on a better board/processor + More ram rather than fuss with an outdated system and just put it all in a rack mountable enclosure with a larger psu than what this has.  As for the file size I am working on Raw photos from a Canon 5dm3 and 5dm4 no video so file sizes are generally under 700MB with Raw's being a tiny fraction in comparison to the Adobe files for edits.  I currently have 2 8 tb external drives full which is why I was looking at the server route rather than just keep getting externals.  

 

in theory I was looking at having 2 out of the 6 drives I have as failover using the other 4 as a start.

 

Thanks

also consider buying a psu with more watts like a 5 to 600 watt psu cause if you have so many hard drives in there there’s more chance that the psu with defect cause of stress