Hardware Configuration options

[wingfat]

The rebuild of my former WHS server has lead me to these forums and the invaluable advice I have received here. My new OS will be built upon FreeBSD based on performance, community based support , and the amazing ZFS file system. (Special thanks to sub.mesa for his zfs guides and reply's - not to mention the upcoming "FreeNAS" type of graphical Interface.)

I have a bunch of hardware and I'm looking for suggestions on how to best utilize it. Available hardware includes:

Tyan "Tank" TA26 TA26B5397 Xenon 2.5MHz / 4GB / 8DriveBays

2 x 5Bay Rosewell Raid/JOBD inclosures w SI 3132 based controller card (Not BSD compatiable)

New...

Norco 4220 20Bay
HP Expander (Thanks SynergyDustin)
Areca 1680x controller
SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-H-O Mini ITX Intel Atom
GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G MotherBoard
AMD Athlon II X4 620 Propus 2.6GHz
Drives 2TB / 1.5TB / 1TB / 750MB (@25 drives)

My inital thoughts are to run FreeBSD from the Tyan and setup the Norco with an old MB to provide the required slot fot the HP Expander. (NO CPU or Memory). The Tyan would host the Areca connected to the HP Expander. The 8 Drives in the Tyan are connected via SAS to the Tyan MB.

With this much hardware I could easily turn the Norco 4220 into a complete system as well.

Any suggestions?

 

[sub.mesa]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H

It's a very special and awesome board, primarily thanks to the dual onboard Intel gigabit NICs. Also it has a modern chipset, low power consumption and extremely small.

Yet, the CPU is not that powerful, maximum memory is 4GB with 2 DIMMs installed and only one PCI-express slot. But hey - this is as good as it gets if you want to go Atom. It surely would not consume a lot of power. I'm not sure whether ZFS performs that well on an Atom, though. The D510 is 64-bit though; i have the same chip here and yes it runs ZFS; but only local storage not anything that gets intensively used.

With 25 drives, i don't think the Atom can keep up. Or at least, that's why concern. A safer option would be an Intel/AMD build.

The Silicon Image SiI-3132 is supported under BSD; i used that controller for some time. It works great when it works; that means it has some BIOS issues which prevent the BIOS from booting if other cards require int 13h access as well. But it would be detected by FreeBSD and should work.

One important side effect of using FakeRAID is that you cannot / should not use the last sector on each drive; as that's where silicon image stores the RAID array configuration like most RAID engines do. That means we have to partition our disks connected to Silicon Image to make sure we never write to the last sector on the disk; by making the partition 1 or 2MB smaller than the full capacity.

So the Silicon Image SiI-3132 may work; have you tried it yet with modern FreeBSD (8.0+)? Of course, as you use expanders; the performance would not be as with dedicated full bandwidth SATA ports. Also, i'm not sure whether AHCI works on SiI-3132; i replaced the controller before the FreeBSD AHCI-driver came out.