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r/DataHoarder•
python2121

My Server Build Plans, Audit's Welcome!

Edit: Ordered everything, had to step down to 2tb drives instead of 3tb to fit the budget with the nicer motherboard and RED drives (instead of Green). Disappointing but budgets, man.

Thanks for the advice, I know I evaded some pitfalls because of this thread.

Hello! I am about to dip my feet into this world of otaku storage server. I have a lot of photos and files that I want to back up and I want to house photos from my immediate family in a place that we can rely on. With that in mind, I have put together this build. While I have built comps, I haven't built anything like this before. The plan is to run Raidz2. I would really appreciate some feedback from the pros around here. I am trying to strike a balance of reliability, storage, and most importantly cost, with a bit of overbuild on the CPU to future-proof for other services. These were my "best guess" after hours of research, so don't hesitate to set me straight.

8x - Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB SATA III 64 MB Cache

2x - Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3 1333 MT/s (PC3-10600) CL9 Unbuffered

1x: A small SSD boot drive (edited)

1x - SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon

1x - Intel Xeon 3.3GHz E3-1230V2 LGA1155 Processor

2x - IO Crest 2 Port SATA III PCI-Express x1 Card

Plus a case, some fans, and cabling come to $1600. One last question, any thoughts on how much power it takes to drive this?

edit: Thank you to the community for your input. It was very helpful and I am ordering it this weekend!

Posted Mar 17, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC · edited

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hamiltenor7.3TB•

Why Greens and not Reds?

Also, I suggest getting an ATX board with a lot of SATA ports because you may regret not having them later.

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mrbubbles0225TB•

I second this, go for Reds. 3 year warranty, TLER support and designed to run 24/7.

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python2121OP16TB•

A poster below suggested a similar board with support for 14 devices for only slightly more than the cost of the current board plus controllers, so I will definitely go that route.

As far as drives, I will now definitely look into getting the Reds.

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SN4T14•

Also look into Blacks/Seagate Barracuda drives, they're cheap and reliable.

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stormcomponents~25TB Usable•

The black series come with 5 year warranty, and if you really want to push the boat out you can get good deals on WD enterprise drives on ebay. Effectively black drives but up to 7 years warranty. I had a load a while and sold them on, which I had kept them now :(

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python2121OP16TB•

I was staying away from Seagate from paranoia after reading this article:

http://techreport.com/news/25940/hard-drive-reliability-study-names-names

But the Seagates are way, way cheaper. I'll definitely look into it further.

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SN4T14•

Yeah, keep in mind those are only certain drives, Seagate also have reliable ones, as seen by the original source.

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muxman16TB•

I have the worst time with WD drives. I've only bought Seagate for years now and have drives that have been running non stop for years. I have 300gb IDE drives from when that was the largest drive you could buy and they still work. Not a problem.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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mrbubbles0225TB•

Unless he needs virtualization, then Xeons are appropriate

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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mrbubbles0225TB•

Nope :( Intel segments the market well.

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python2121OP16TB•

Yeah, I feel a bit forced into the Xenon for ECC support :-/ otherwise way overkill

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mrbubbles0225TB•

If you just want ECC, no virtualization (vt-d) or integrated graphics, then go for an i3 as mentioned above - they have a few models with ECC support.

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SirMaster40TB(usable) RAIDZ2•

If he wants to save money he could get the Celeron G1820 for $50

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116974

Yes it supports ECC.

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SN4T14•

Xeons aren't overkill if you're using compression.

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python2121OP16TB•

Hey, thank you for the feedback. I was going to run Ubuntu LTS and basically tack on services in the future as I saw fit such as plex and transmission. Even though I know that all comes with FreeNAS, I am more comfortable just using ubuntu since that is what I am comfortable with, but might check out FreeNAS.

I figured I would use the 32gb SSD as my boot volume for the OS. I was going to buy the best bang for the buck, and that looked like the absolute wrong drive to have included. I just need a regular SSD, not a cache ssd. Once again, really glad reddit is around. Thank you.

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nogodsorkings1•

I think that's a good call for an OS install. Perhaps you could run the OS as a RAID 1 of two cheap SSDs.

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nogodsorkings1•

Can confirm; Also have Xeon FreeNAS server. The highest CPU load I've ever seen when running everything was 15%. The main reason I chose this was for ECC support, and I didn't know there were some i3s that had this. It's also nice to be able to re-use this board for a ESXi host in the future.

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python2121OP16TB•

Thanks for the perspective! Any transcoding or is that all I/O and network?

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nogodsorkings1•

I'm just running I/O and network. Looking to add ftp and torrent services on the box, but most services will be virtualized on a different machine.

Transcoding is pointless when even my lowest end embedded system now has the power to decode straight from a BluRay ISO on a shared directory.

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john-r20TB•

Is that ram ecc. If not get ecc.

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python2121OP16TB•

Definitely ECC.

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Sarcasto-Bot•

Is that what it's going to be called?

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john-r20TB•

I called mine ozymandias , recently was very happy with it.

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svq•

Any reason why you picked an older gen Supermicro board instead of an X10?

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python2121OP16TB•

No reason at all. I guess I just saw it as widely available with acceptable reviews (I was looking for the cheapest legit xeon board and it seemed well reviewed). Would you advise going for something like this instead?

http://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Motherboard-Ultra-DDR3-MBD-X10SLM-F-O/dp/B00D65MWL6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1395103093&sr=8-3&keywords=supermicro+x10

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svq•

I would recommend this board:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm

It supports the latest Haswell chips which will use less power and includes an LSI 2308 SAS2/SATA chip which provides 8 additional ports for a total of 14 devices (10 at 6Gbps, 4 at 3Gbps) without an add-on card.

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python2121OP16TB•

Thank you. Total noob question, a search online suggests that SATA drives will work in the SAS ports because they are interchangeable in the direction, is that the correct takeaway?

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SirMaster40TB(usable) RAIDZ2•

Yeah SATA drives work in SAS ports.

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ixidorecu•

5 minutes of research turns up the intel 1150 based boards, the newer nic's on them are well supported in ESX/freenas. while not insurmountable, i would rather stick with a x9 based board that is well supported. and tbh, why would you want latest and greatest for a file server?

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SirMaster40TB(usable) RAIDZ2•

For the CPU I would recommend the following.

Total performance.
http://ark.intel.com/products/75054/intel-xeon-processor-e3-1230-v3-8m-cache-3_30-ghz

Still fast but very low power usage (25w).
http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1230L-v3-8M-Cache-1_80-GHz

Budget processor ($50).
http://ark.intel.com/products/78955/Intel-Celeron-Processor-G1820-2M-Cache-2_70-GHz

All support ECC.

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python2121OP16TB•

Thank you! I think I will step up to the 1st.

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SirMaster40TB(usable) RAIDZ2•

It's great, it's the one I use :)

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nogodsorkings1•

Only comment I would add is that RAIDZ1/2/3 can see quite a performance hit. It is also difficult to scale, since most storage arrays call for adding a vDev of the same type. That means that the best practice for expansion would be either replacing every single drive, or adding another 8-way RAIDZ2.

I think you would be better off adding mirrored pairs of drives. They will be faster, and you can expand by adding another mirror or only replacing two drives at a time.

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FunnySheep98 TiB netto (128 bruto)•

Maybe a blog article I wrote may be of interest to you.

http://louwrentius.com/an-affordable-server-platform-based-on-server-grade-hardware.html

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python2121OP16TB•

Thank you for the information!

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