Input requested on NAS build

N

nexium

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Looking for input on new NAS setup

Setting up 2 identical NAS boxes for media storage/streaming and would appreciate any suggestions/criticisms. My requirements are fairly simple: lots of storage and enough throughput to handle streaming of 2 bluray rips and maybe an mp3 stream.

Currently looking at the following setup:

Case: Norco 4020
Controller Card: Intel SASUC8I
PSU: Corsair TX750W
OS: Will be trying FreeBSD/OpenSolaris + ZFS with WHS as a plan B if I run into any problems.
Cables: Norco C-SFF8087-4S SFF-8087 to 4X SAS/SATA Breakout Cable
Drives: Western Digital WD20EADS with WDIDLE and WDTLER mods, will be starting with 5 drives in each norco in raid5, will be goin to raid6 once storage is upto 10 drives.

Now for the Questions:

RAM: Do I really need ECC? I am willing to spend the $ if the performance is worth it.

CPU: Looking at a Core i5 661 Clarkdale , which if i am reading correctly is ECC compatible.

Mobo: Question 1 - What is the performance gain when dealing with 2 PCIe at 16/4 vs 8/8? the Intel SASUC8I is 8x.
Question 2 - As for the Nic, how bad are the Realtek on board Nics? Would I gain anything by adding in something along the lines of a Intel EXPI9301CTBLK (PCIe x1) Keep in mind this is for home use, and all I have right now is a Dlink 655 and I stream to a Zotac Zbox hd-id11.

If non-ecc ram is the better way to go, I was looking at a MSI H57M-ED65 mobo, but its PCIe is is 16/4, see above question, not sure if that matters.



Any input about the build would be much appreciated, would like to get this all right the first time.
 
Someone told me ECC is only on Intel Xeons if you go Intel
Otherwise all AMDs support it?
Might wanna double check
Yay OpenSolaris
 
Thoughts: Consider the Norco RPC-4220... I have both the 4220 and 4020. The 4220 has better quality hotswap trays but the 4020 has room for 2 more 3.5" disks (where the 4220 has room for 2x 2.5" disks).

ECC is good to have if you have tons of storage. If you are storing blu-ray rips you basically have to worry about a corrupt file (blu-ray is fairly good at handling a low number of errors) and a system crash every so often (not really sure how often this happens but it is pretty low chance). ECC memory is slower than non-ECC, with unbuffered being faster than buffered/ registered. In reality, you won't notice the difference so ECC will give you slightly better stability/ data security.

The i5-661 is not a bad choice. Personally, I would go with the 650 if you want an i5, the 530 if you don't need the i5's extra features, OR get a Xeon X3430 or X3440. The Xeons support ECC and have four cores (lower clocks) but cost about as much as the 32nm i5's.

Motherboard: I wouldn't worry about 16/4 v 8/8 too much. If you do go Xeon you can get a Supermicro X8SIL-F with dual Intel onboard NICs and a bunch of other features (it also works with the 32nm i3's and i5's but you don't get ECC functions). It is a popular board a lot of us use. That NIC you have is pretty good (much better than Realtek) and uses the same Intel 82574L controller that the X8SIL-F uses on each of its onboard data NICs. Once you add an Intel NIC to that H57M-ED65 you are basically same price as the X8SIL-F which is vastly superior for a server build.

Basically an i3, i5, or Xeon 34xx is overkill for a ZFS server. You can make due with a pretty low end CPU. Then again, if you are looking to fill one or two 20-bay enclosures, spending ~$400 on a really good CPU/ mobo isn't a bad idea.
 
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pjkenned said:
Thoughts: Consider the Norco RPC-4220... I have both the 4220 and 4020. The 4220 has better quality hotswap trays but the 4020 has room for 2 more 3.5" disks (where the 4220 has room for 2x 2.5" disks).

ECC is good to have if you have tons of storage. If you are storing blu-ray rips you basically have to worry about a corrupt file (blu-ray is fairly good at handling a low number of errors) and a system crash every so often (not really sure how often this happens but it is pretty low chance). ECC memory is slower than non-ECC, with unbuffered being faster than buffered/ registered. In reality, you won't notice the difference so ECC will give you slightly better stability/ data security.

The i5-661 is not a bad choice. Personally, I would go with the 650 if you want an i5, the 530 if you don't need the i5's extra features, OR get a Xeon X3430 or X3440. The Xeons support ECC and have four cores (lower clocks) but cost about as much as the 32nm i5's.

Motherboard: I wouldn't worry about 16/4 v 8/8 too much. If you do go Xeon you can get a Supermicro X8SIL-F with dual Intel onboard NICs and a bunch of other features (it also works with the 32nm i3's and i5's but you don't get ECC functions). It is a popular board a lot of us use. That NIC you have is pretty good (much better than Realtek) and uses the same Intel 82574L controller that the X8SIL-F uses on each of its onboard data NICs. Once you add an Intel NIC to that H57M-ED65 you are basically same price as the X8SIL-F which is vastly superior for a server build.

Basically an i3, i5, or Xeon 34xx is overkill for a ZFS server. You can make due with a pretty low end CPU. Then again, if you are looking to fill one or two 20-bay enclosures, spending ~$400 on a really good CPU/ mobo isn't a bad idea.
Click to expand...

These are all good points. A few other things to think about though. If you are using ZFS or are running VM's on the server, going with an X58 based motherboard and 1366 CPU is a pretty good idea, since you get 6 DDR3 RAM slots instead of 4. This means you can relatively inexpensively go with 2 GB DIMM's and 12 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB of RAM with only four slots. Sure, you can go to 4 GB DIMM's, but the price on those is astronomical. Prices are not that much more for an X58 config and i7-930 CPU, and another major price cut on 1366 parts is coming in august. Also, the 1156 socket is going to be transitioned next year, but the 1366 socket will continue for awhile more.

The supermicro boards are great, and the X58 based X8ST3-F has 8 SAS ports hung off an LSI 1068 RAID controller on board, plus the 6 ICH10R SATA ports and Intel NICs and tons of expansion. So adding 8 more SATA ports to fill out a 20 port Norco is pretty cheap, and you have 2 ports left for a system disk and optical drive. Very nice for a ZFS config.

The downside of the supermicro boards is that they are fussy about RAM. You can spend as much on RAM as the CPU and motherboard if you have to use registered ECC DDR3, so this is not something to take lightly. Try and find folks who have tested the RAM you want to use before going this route. These are not overclocking boards so they don't have DRAM tweaks that allow you to work around timing issues that can affect utility. I wish supermicro would put some work in to improving memory compatibility.

Good luck on your project!
 
a small Tip you might wanna consider -
if you not planning on having a connected Keyboard/Mouse/Video to this server, think about having KVM over IP capabilities, you can have it onboard with Supermicro boards (feature called IPMI 2.0) or with Intel Q57 chipsets.
you can always purchase something similar in the future, but it'll cost you much less when it's onboard.

good luck
 
Agreed with the above about the Supermicro X8ST3-F. It has KVM over IP (as does the X8SIL-F I mentioned), and also a LSI SAS1068e (8 port controller) built in. Basically it means you get 2x Intel NICs (~$70) + the LSI controller (~$150) built in. If you are looking to get an Intel NIC and that Intel controller (I think that's the one with the same controller as the X8ST3-F has onboard), it makes the motherboard look comparatively cheap. Big weakness is that you don't get ECC support and the LGA1366 platform uses more power. Since the OP was looking at a 32nm CPU originally, going LGA1366 seems like overkill, but there is a case to be made.
 
Interesting board! But kind of expensive. Unlike on Windows, FreeBSD can use any network adapter for link aggregation; so teaming a realtek and onboard marvell for example should work fine. I'm keen on testing this out, with 4 gigabit on the server and 2x gigabit on my two most used clients.

A cheaper alternative might just be a regular board with an additional PCIe x1 gigabit NIC, if you do not require the additional features of that board, which are very nice for a home server by the way! But it might be overkill for modest setups.
 
I think the big thing is that the OP mentioned wanting to add a Intel SASUC8I + possibly an Intel NIC and the Norco RPC-4020. That makes the Supermicro X8ST3-F look inexpensive when you compare buying another board + add-on cards.

I am still a huge fan of Intel cards, but I run mostly Windows environments. It isn't a factor of link aggregation as much as it is single NIC performance, especially streaming video.
 
Thanks for the input, it is appreciated. So unless anyone else has any other suggestions I will be pairing the Supermicro X8SIL-F + Xeon X3440 + Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G

The Supermicro X8ST3-F is not in stock at any of the Canadian retailers that I could find.
 
sub.mesa said:
Interesting board! But kind of expensive. Unlike on Windows, FreeBSD can use any network adapter for link aggregation; so teaming a realtek and onboard marvell for example should work fine. I'm keen on testing this out, with 4 gigabit on the server and 2x gigabit on my two most used clients.

A cheaper alternative might just be a regular board with an additional PCIe x1 gigabit NIC, if you do not require the additional features of that board, which are very nice for a home server by the way! But it might be overkill for modest setups.
Click to expand...

The link aggregation does support different kinds of NIC's, but I am not sure that is a good idea. It should split the load evenly across the two controllers, but if the controllers are not matched and one has a performance issue, then I think you could run into problems. I am definitely not a realtek fan in performance configurations.

Intel server NIC';s have a lot of benefits, esp in a virtualized environment, though broadcom NIC's are close. There is a reason why one of these two chipsets are found on virtually every server board.

Also, driver support for these tends to be universally good across all OS platforms, even opensolaris.

Of course, for most people this is all overkill, but I would argue any situation where link teaming is something that is viewed as not overkill, the Intel NIC's would definitely not be overkill. I'd take a single Intel NIC over teamed realteks any day - it's not worth the complexity to get around a fundamental performance defect. And the onboard NIC's on the SM boards are better than the single PCIE intel gigabit NIC in several ways because of how Intel differentiates the parts.
 
pjkenned said:
Agreed with the above about the Supermicro X8ST3-F. It has KVM over IP (as does the X8SIL-F I mentioned), and also a LSI SAS1068e (8 port controller) built in. Basically it means you get 2x Intel NICs (~$70) + the LSI controller (~$150) built in. If you are looking to get an Intel NIC and that Intel controller (I think that's the one with the same controller as the X8ST3-F has onboard), it makes the motherboard look comparatively cheap. Big weakness is that you don't get ECC support and the LGA1366 platform uses more power. Since the OP was looking at a 32nm CPU originally, going LGA1366 seems like overkill, but there is a case to be made.
Click to expand...

I think the X8ST3-F supports ECC RAM if you use the appropriate XEON CPU in it. A normal i7-930 CPU will not support ECC though, but if you don't need ECC, stay away from the XEONs as they make this board much fussier about the RAM it wants to use.

As you point out, this board is very cost effective for a medium end NAS config with room to grow. An intel server NIC will run you $60-80, more if you want two for teaming, and the SAS controller is worth about $150. Since you can get this for $300 from ewiz, it's like you are getting the core motherboard and the IPMI support for $90 or less, and that makes this board a steal.

An X58 will use somewhat more power, but it lets you add 4 more GB of DDR3 RAM because of the two additional RAM slots. Very good for ZFS caching or running VM's.

of course, if you have the RAID card and the NIC's and an IP KVM already, then things are not quite as good... :)
 
nexium said:
Thanks for the input, it is appreciated. So unless anyone else has any other suggestions I will be pairing the Supermicro X8SIL-F + Xeon X3440 + Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G

The Supermicro X8ST3-F is not in stock at any of the Canadian retailers that I could find.
Click to expand...


This is the setup I was recommended by a member here and it works beautifully. The IPMI 2.0 is pretty slick too. I will be using the setup to run 20x 2TB WD20EADS drives to server blurays to 3 I3/530 Intel H57DJG setups in the house.
 
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