This AM4 Motherboard any good? (FreeNAS)

[FloRolf]

Hey guys, 

 

So I wanna build a FreeNAS based on my ryzen 5 2400G but I don't have a motherboard for it yet. The only things I wanna run is a 2x10gbit pcie card that takes up a pcie 3.0 x8 slot. Hard-drive will be 2 initially with up to 5 in the future for maximum redundancy on ZFS. I'll add a 250gig nvme SSD as a cache aswell. 

 

I found this Gigabyte board for just 80 bucks and I would even get a 40€ steam coupon with it, so essentially just 40€ for the board. 

It's the b450 auros M (https://www.aorus.com/product-detail.php?p=796&t=53&t2=&t3=) 

 

Is this a good board in general/for a NAS? 

Should I go for anything else? Keep in mind I want to stay on Matx Form factor to use a node 804.

 

I know it doesn't support ECC but I don't think the cpu does either and is it really necessary?

 

 

Thanks for the help, have a nice day

[Ahaber]

Looks fine to me as long as you don't want more than 6 drives. The only other thing to keep in mind would be to make sure the 10gbit LAN card has drivers for linux that will work with FreeNAS

[Technomancer__]

this should do fine

from where are you going to buy it?

[manikyath]

i dont see much wrong with the board choice.

 

by the way, protip: if you run out of sata connectors, most cheap 'fakeraid' cards act like a plain HBA under linux.

[FloRolf]

1 hour ago, Ahaber said:

Looks fine to me as long as you don't want more than 6 drives. The only other thing to keep in mind would be to make sure the 10gbit LAN card has drivers for linux that will work with FreeNAS

Yeah i think i already fucked that up in impulse buying an Fujitsu OCe14102. I want a dual port one (sfp+) to be able to give super fast connection to two PCs.

I also only want up to 5 HDDs, one NVMe SSD and maybe another SSD for the OS.

For the OS SSD i have the Kingston A400 120gb in mind as it's just 20€. People usually run it off of a USB stick so i think that should be good?

 

50 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

this should do fine

from where are you going to buy it?

Buying from Mindfactoy.de It's german so you probably don't know it. Not sure if the Steam Deal is available in all over EU or just GER or even just this specific store

 

 

38 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i dont see much wrong with the board choice.

 

by the way, protip: if you run out of sata connectors, most cheap 'fakeraid' cards act like a plain HBA under linux.

Yeah, i don't think SATA ports will be a problem.

 

 

 

Thanks a ton guys, think i'll order the Board now. Any opinions on the SSD as i would just purchase it aswell. 

And again for the RAM, they say ECC is strongly recommended. I'm not trying to run the most stable, business grade NAS but 

i should still be able to run 24/7 without problems. Again, ECC ram would also require a different motherboard.

16gb ECC ram is around 180€ now while 16gb non ECC is just 115€, that's quite a difference imo. 

[beersykins]

10 hours ago, FloRolf said:

Hard-drive will be 2 initially with up to 5 in the future

You might want to strategize your zfs plan as it's not exactly trivial to add additional storage.  You'd also want at least three drives for raidz as there's really no difference between that and mirroring with two.

[FloRolf]

5 hours ago, beersykins said:

You might want to strategize your zfs plan as it's not exactly trivial to add additional storage.  You'd also want at least three drives for raidz as there's really no difference between that and mirroring with two.

well damn, i just found that out aswell.

 

That makes me reconsider but i really don't know what to do now.

Here's my problem:

Acc. to this website (https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html) (which doesn't load on my desktop anymore but does on my phone)

i need at least 4 drives for a raidz2, which i would really like because of the increased redundancy compared to Raidz and Raid10.

 

Now though, the read/write speeds of exactly that scenario (4x4Tb Raidz2) are freaking terrible. what the f.?!

 

I could increase to 6x4TB to have good speeds again, but that also doubles the storage to ~15TB (i only really need ~8TB usable storage)

and adds another ~230€ of harddrives making it a total of over 650€ just in drives (+ another 500€ in hardware).

Also with 6 drives i fully saturate the chosen motherboards 6 SATA ports without even having a boot ssd. 

6 drives additionally means i'd need another 16gb of ram because of the 1gb/1tb rule. 

 

 

So i'm really not sure what to do now. Maybe @manikyath and @Technomancer__ have some input aswell. 

Why is this shit so hard?

[Technomancer__]

10 hours ago, FloRolf said:

well damn, i just found that out aswell.

 

That makes me reconsider but i really don't know what to do now.

Here's my problem:

Acc. to this website (https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html) (which doesn't load on my desktop anymore but does on my phone)

i need at least 4 drives for a raidz2, which i would really like because of the increased redundancy compared to Raidz and Raid10.

 

Now though, the read/write speeds of exactly that scenario (4x4Tb Raidz2) are freaking terrible. what the f.?!

 

I could increase to 6x4TB to have good speeds again, but that also doubles the storage to ~15TB (i only really need ~8TB usable storage)

and adds another ~230€ of harddrives making it a total of over 650€ just in drives (+ another 500€ in hardware).

Also with 6 drives i fully saturate the chosen motherboards 6 SATA ports without even having a boot ssd. 

6 drives additionally means i'd need another 16gb of ram because of the 1gb/1tb rule. 

 

 

So i'm really not sure what to do now. Maybe @manikyath and @Technomancer__ have some input aswell. 

Why is this shit so hard?

That was what I was trying to tell you.

 

Unraid is very versatile you can even start from 1 data drive.

I would recommend starting with 1 data and 1 parity drive. This whould basicly be raid 1

In the future when you run out of storage you can add another data drive and it will become like raid 5 with 3 drives.

 

I recommend you get 3 of this 2 data and 1 parity

 

I have only 1 data drive but all important data is backed up to other drives outside the array. ( I will add 1 data drive and 1 parity drive in the future)