build FreeNAS build help

[flowrin]

Hello!

We currently have at the office(a web development agency) a FreeNAS built from unused PC parts from around the office and we have been very happy with it. But now it's full and it's time for an upgrade.

The parts I thought of are:

Case: Zalman Z11 Plus
2x HDD Rack: Thermaltake Max 3503 SATA HDD Rack
6x HDD: WD Red 6TB SATA-III 5400RPM 256MB WD60EFAX
PSU: Seasonic Focus GX, 80+ Gold, 650W FOCUS-GX-650
2x USB memory stick: Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 32GB
RAM: HyperX Fury Black 64GB DDR4 3200MHz CL16 Dual Channel Kit

My thoughts:

• I choose that case because it's cheap and has four 5.25 inch bays to fit the two HDD racks.
• The HDDs will be fitted in the racks and used in a RAID-Z2.
• In the future, we could fit another 6 HDDs in the internal bays of the case and connect them using a PCI SATA controller.

I'm undecided if I should go with AMD or Intel, the two options I thought of are:

CPU: Intel Coffee Lake, Core i7 9700 3.0GHz box BX80684I79700
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Z390-PRO GAMING

OR

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz box 100-100000025BOX
Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 GAMING PLUS

I've read about some temperature reporting errors with Ryzen CPUs but other than that couldn't find anything that could break the system. Besides I've read that Ryzen official support comes later this year when FreeNAS and TrueNAS merge.

What it will be used for:

• finished web design projects and website backup storage with samba shares
• a separate share for web development
• around 10 people will use it, 5 of them through a VPN
• maybe a small Ubuntu virtual machine

What do you guys think about this build? Should I go AMD or Intel?

[boggy77]

The msi x570 gaming plus is a poor motherboard. Go with the cheapest asus x570, it will be much better. Also, go with the 3700x, unless the 3800x is almost the same price. The difference between them is very small.

[Jarsky]

 

25 minutes ago, boggy77 said:

The msi x570 gaming plus is a poor motherboard. Go with the cheapest asus x570, it will be much better. Also, go with the 3700x, unless the 3800x is almost the same price. The difference between them is very small.

 

Or get an ASRock B450 Pro4 / X470 Taichi / X570 Taichi. They support ECC memory which would be more preferable for a FreeNAS server than desktop memory. 

And yeah 3800x is unnecessary expense, a 3600 is $100 cheaper than even a 3700x and plenty of overhead for running some VM's if you need that. 

[FloRolf]

Tbh I think that's quite overkill. 

I run a 6x4TB freenas in Raid Z2 with a 2400G and never had performance issues. Granted I don't have 10 users accessing it but it's still a fast Quad core +SMT. I can't see why you'd need an 8 core. 

The 2400G also brings the benefit of having an iGPU which no current 3rd Gen Ryzen has so you'd need a dgpu at some point (unless you are really tech savvy) 

 

64gigs seems excessive as well, Freenas recommends 1gb per TB storage but you can easily get away with less. I'd say go 32gb with the option to go to 64 later in case you realize it's not enough. ECC is ofc preferred and for actual work use I'd definitely spend the extra. I only use mine for private use so I'm fine with standard ram. 

 

As for performance, I get around 500mb/s read and writes out of my 6 drive RaidZ2 so that's fantastic. You should consider a 10g NIC and one of the small 8 port switches (with 2x10g/6x1g) to distribute at least full GBit to all your workstations. 

 

And btw temp reading of my 2400G is fine but freenas just shows it quite stupidly. 

[Windows7ge]

I'd opt for a server platform with ECC memory support. There are a couple AMD boards out that come with some of the perks of a server platform including IPMI otherwise I'd go intel/Xeon and a similar motherboard from manufacturers like ASRock Rack or Supermicro.

 

6 hours ago, FloRolf said:

Freenas recommends 1gb per TB storage

This is a misconception. iXsystems effectively made up this value to represent how much RAM ZFS requires. Meanwhile they did not consult the ZFS developers as to how much RAM their File System actually requires. I've spoken with a 2nd generation ZFS team developer and he has explained that you could easily run 1EB of storage on 1GB of RAM no problem.

 

This myth came into play with deduplication but even then the 1GB of RAM/TB of storage was still proven false.

 

As an additional note data stored in ARC is ejectable. ARC will make the most of however much free RAM you have available. This doesn't help the case where people think FreeNAS is a RAM hog when really everything in ARC can be deleted. If the system needs space in RAM it will eject the data in the ARC. Because of this you can effective count the ARC as free memory.

[FloRolf]

17 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I'd opt for a server platform with ECC memory support. There are a couple AMD boards out that come with some of the perks of a server platform including IPMI otherwise I'd go intel/Xeon and a similar motherboard from manufacturers like ASRock Rack or Supermicro.

 

This is a misconception. iXsystems effectively made up this value to represent how much RAM ZFS requires. Meanwhile they did not consult the ZFS developers as to how much RAM their File System actually requires. I've spoken with a 2nd generation ZFS team developer and he has explained that you could easily run 1EB of storage on 1GB of RAM no problem.

 

This myth came into play with deduplication but even then the 1GB of RAM/TB of storage was still proven false.

 

As an additional note data stored in ARC is ejectable. ARC will make the most of however much free RAM you have available. This doesn't help the case where people think FreeNAS is a RAM hog when really everything in ARC can be deleted. If the system needs space in RAM it will eject the data in the ARC. Because of this you can effective count the ARC as free memory.

 

That's why I added

 

7 hours ago, FloRolf said:

but you can easily get away with less

 

But thanks for clearing it up in detail again

 

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

That's why I added

But thanks for clearing it up in detail again

I know but the way you worded it doesn't help the misconception. Gives people reason to believe it's legit but that they can cheat it.