My 24TB Storage Box :)

T

toolius

Adept
Hey guys.. just finished up the build for my Storage server...
The config is pretty self explanatory from the pictures :)
Basically its the following:-

Cosmos s2
i3-2120
Maximus 5 formula
Lsi 9261-8i Raid Card ( Setup in Raid 5)
24TB of WD Red Hdd's
Plextor 128GB SSD For Boot
Ax 850
16GB Ram
Gtx 650
H80

The Pictures :)


























Cheers For Looking Guys :)
Kind Regards Always !
 
pratikb said:
congrats.
May I ask why 16 gb RAM for file server?
pls enlighten.
Click to expand...

This box will be running Free Nas mostly and they recommend 1GB per TB for Raid 5 if possible :)

Taken from the info page for Free Nas:-

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

The best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS® system is to install as much RAM as possible. If your RAM is limited, consider using UFS until you can afford better hardware. ZFS typically requires a minimum of 8 GB of RAM in order to provide good performance. The more RAM, the better the performance, and the FreeNAS® Forums provide anecdotal evidence from users on how much performance is gained by adding more RAM. For systems with large disk capacity (greater than 6 TB), a general rule of thumb is 1 GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage. This post describes how RAM is used by ZFS.

NOTE: by default, ZFS disables pre-fetching (caching) for systems containing less than 4 GB of usable RAM. Not using pre-fetching can greatly reduce performance. 4 GB of usable RAM is not the same thing as 4 GB installed RAM as the operating system resides in RAM. This means that the practical pre-fetching threshold is 6 GB, or 8 GB of installed RAM. You can still use ZFS with less RAM, but performance will be affected.

Cheers bro :)[DOUBLEPOST=1363982287][/DOUBLEPOST]
vivek.krishnan said:
Really nice Shatul. Nice tags too!
Click to expand...
Thank you tons for the kind words bro :)
 
storage box eh!!!!! thats almost like a gaming rig :woot:

why GTX650? are you going to use it as a media device? or some sort of encoder for media servers? (like plex etc?)

also why AX850? the HDDs, RAID controller and the RAM are prolly going to top off at 100 watts? very curious to know.



_
 
that is a badass setup.
but i did not understand some of your choices. (myself being a freenas user)

gpu choice - i thought gpu was not utilised.
ssd choice - i assume this rig will be used on lan on which the speed will be much lower than the hdd speed. Secondly isnt freenas loaded from the usb drive? so what use is the ssd drive?
cabinet - any particular reason
cpu cooler - wouldnt cpu be running on stock. even without ac a basic cooler should be enough.
motherboard - buying such a high end board? what features of the board would actually be used for freenas?

wouldnt 3-4 Lan cards help in such a setup?

also can you tell me the damage for the lsi card and the hdd.

i was just curious about these as i am planning on setting up a second freenas rig soon.
 
stormblast said:
that is a badass setup.
but i did not understand some of your choices. (myself being a freenas user)

gpu choice - i thought gpu was not utilised.
ssd choice - i assume this rig will be used on lan on which the speed will be much lower than the hdd speed. Secondly isnt freenas loaded from the usb drive? so what use is the ssd drive?
cabinet - any particular reason
cpu cooler - wouldnt cpu be running on stock. even without ac a basic cooler should be enough.
motherboard - buying such a high end board? what features of the board would actually be used for freenas

wouldt 3-4 Lan cards help in such a setup?

also can you tell me the damage for the lsi card and the hdd.

i was just curious about these as i am planning on setting up a second freenas rig soon.
Click to expand...


Hey bro :)

Thank you for the kind words !!

Umm onboard Intel Gpu is a no go for Ubuntu and the likes .. So for best support , i went with nvidia. Most of these parts i had lying aound so decided to use them :)

SSD is in right now cause its running server 2012 right now while i test it and put it through its paces. It might get taken out once the box is fully setup :) After all like you said the os will run of a pen drive and never get rebooted so it don't matter :)

Cabinet also couldn't find something that could hold 8 drives comfortably and provide room for further expansion !

As for the Cpu cooler.. Had this lying around !

The motherboard was the only one i did choose to buy because of my raid card. There are horror stories of the LSI web bios not working on a ton of boards.quite a few boards have shown wired behaviour with Raid Cards ! If the WS series of Motherboards was available from Asus . id be looking in that direction !The only reasons for choosing a top end board like this are :- Totally overbuilt for the processor and hence lesser load , lesser heat and long term reliability and the most important..... Raid Card Compatibility. :) I have seen this card not even detect on a few lesser boards !

I do have a 2 port Intel I350-T2 that will be going in very soon :)

The Lsi card with BBU cost about 52K here and the WD reds were about 9.8K each :)

Cheers my bro and take care..
Thank you ton again for the kind words and Kind regards !
 
Your setup is certainly overkill for freenas!
Why use hardware raid when Freenas has RAIDZ? I say save some bucks and get some good CAT6 wiring and a switch that supports link aggregation. I see that you have already bought an Intel Dual port gigabit NIC, wise decision that, Realtek is know to underperform compared to intel NIC.
You can use the SSD as A ZFS Intent log or ZIL, will help speed up transfers, but a word of warning, only use ZIL with the latest version of freenas because if you lose the ZIL device and you are on ZFS v15, you lose all your data. while on latest freenas (ZFS V28), you only lose data that was not written to the pool

One more thing,
What are the concurrent number of reads and writes do you expect on the system?
 
Holy smokes... one helluva storage build! Many congrats bro and I might just pop into your crib and nick one of those Red's! ;)

OTOH... why the Cosmos 2, what happened to the Supermicro case?
 
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