Cheap ZFS build

N

Nolhian

n00b
Joined
Apr 30, 2011
Messages
12
Hello,

I'm trying to build a cheap ZFS server. AMD seems the way to go with ECC support since Intel require expensive server motherboards. So far I'm there :


MB : ASUS M4A78LT-M LE ( 6 SATA ) => 42€ / 60$
CPU : Athlon II X2 250 => 40€ / 57$
RAM : 2x2go Crucial ECC unbuffered ( CT25672BA1067 ) => 55€ / 78$

Total : 137€ / 194$

What do you think about it ?

I'll go with a 1068e card on the PCI-E 16X + 8 to 10 Samsung F2E 1.5to in either 10 raidz3 or 2 different vdev.

Do you think the CPU is powerful enough to handle this ?

Thanks in advance,
Nolhian
 
The CPU should definitely be powerful enough but you might want to get more ram if you can afford it.

I can't seem to find out what kind of NIC the board has but that might be important.
 
I agree with s0rce: that's a pretty weak processor. You could spend a little more and get something significantly faster, which, depending on your goals for ZFS, could improve performance a bit.

4GB of RAM is fine for a basic build. I don't think you need more than that, at least initially. That said, DDR3 is so cheap right now, I'd splurge and go for 8GB.
 
wow that was fast :)

@s0rce : I didn't find anything on the NIC either.

@Gigas-VII : Actually i think s0rce said the CPU was fine, but yes it's low end, on a par with Pentium E6500 or Core 2 duo 7400. My goal is just to have an opensolaris/Nexenta system with one raidz pool ( 10 to of data) to be a NAS server. No VMs or anything. Do you consider it weak for this purpose ?

I'll definitely check about the 8GB !

Thanks :)
 
Regarding the CPU speed, my nas (solaris 11) has a E-350 (zacate APU) which is even slower and its fine, I do routine NAS tasks like media streaming and backup along with running sabnzbd+sick-beard and asterisk for VOIP. Using dd over gigabit I get 90mb read/write.
 
Intel NICs are reputed to be the best bet with solaris.

I use a Realtek 8111E and it seems to work fine but other people have had problems with realtek NICs. I'm not sure about Atheros. If it doesn't work return the board :).
 
My 'last' zfs build was a q6600 with only 4gb (might had been 8gb) ram. It wasn't vm or anything running FreeBSD. There was no problems that I encountered on it while serving over 70TB of storage to all my house PCs.

It was my current build til only about 2 months ago when I finally upgraded to a 'real' ESXI all-in-one. That was my main NAS for must have been at least 2 years mostly problem free. I believe the q6600 is equivalent to e7400 (quad instead of dual). New machine is bit beefier tho but that's only because I wanted to play with vm. 1230 with 16gb ecc and almost doubling the total storage.
 
Nolhian said:
I think you're right Jesse B, that's what the download section on Asus website shows. Well if it doesn't work, could i just add something like that http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Intel-Pro-100...Computing_NetworkCards_RL&hash=item3cb620c631 ?
Click to expand...

That's where I found it :)

That NIC would work, but just note that PCI has a maximum throughput of 1Gbit, so if you have more than one of those cards installed, you won't be able to achieve full Gbit speeds. This isn't an issue with PCI-e.
 
Oh that's pretty sweet. Exactly what I want - and I'd *love* a ZFS NAS.

Trouble is size. There's no compact, PSU-less mITX box that just houses 4 drives and nothing else. If there were I would be very happy. (PSU-less because I'd use a picoPSU)
 
@antioch

you're right there really isnt a perfect case the little chenbro with 4 hotswap bays is nice but expensive and it has a psu. I decided to go the cheap route a got this case (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154084) on sale. It has space for 4x 3.5" HDD and a little 2.5" SDD as the OS drive. It also has a 250W PSU that has worked well for me so far. If it dies I'll grab a pico-psu. The server draws about 45W idle and 80-90W spinning up the drives.
 
Even the expensive chenbro is so big. It makes me sad.

Good to hear about the max power draw, though. 45w idle is *really* high though. Shouldn't it be like ~1W per HD (let's just call it 5W total) and the cpu/chipset should idle at ~24W for a total of 30W -- which is still quite high.
 
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