Rate my FreeNAS ZFS box

[nk215]

Dave, what's your take on this board?

Supermicro X9SRA Server Motherboard - Intel C602 Chipset - Socket R LGA-2011

My needs is similar to the OP but with 2x PCIe x16 for my Ndivia grid/quadro cards. It'll be a server not a NAS but mostly serve out files and pass on CUDAs via RPD.

I recommend the OP to look into server type setup rather than NAS.

 

[Essence_of_War]

As a side note - I was rather frustrated by this. Celeron, Pentium, and i3 CPUs support ECC, but not Vt-d. i5 and i7 chips support Vt-d but not ECC. You need a Xeon to get both in the same box.

What's the situation if you go with AMD's FX line instead? Do they offer AES-NI, Vt-d, and ECC support on the whole CPU line?

 

[Sequences]

As a side note - I was rather frustrated by this. Celeron, Pentium, and i3 CPUs support ECC, but not Vt-d. i5 and i7 chips support Vt-d but not ECC. You need a Xeon to get both in the same box.

Only server-grade chips have all the bells and whistles. Regardless, there are i5 and i7 equivalents of Xeon chips and they are not that expensive.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75052/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1220-v3-8M-Cache-3_10-GHz

Four cores, four threads, around the same price as your typical i5.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75055/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1240-v3-8M-Cache-3_40-GHz

Four cores, eight threads, less than $300. The only difference is that these are called Xeon instead of Core.

 

[Elixer]

What's the situation if you go with AMD's FX line instead? Do they offer AES-NI, Vt-d, and ECC support on the whole CPU line?

Pretty much, only the very low end don't support hardware virtualization.
The same is true for ECC, except, they support unbuffered ECC RAM.

If you need buffered, then you need opteron class CPUs & motherboards.

That is one nice thing about AMD's CPU line, they don't gimp some chips to only support X, and not Y.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Only server-grade chips have all the bells and whistles. Regardless, there are i5 and i7 equivalents of Xeon chips and they are not that expensive.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75052/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1220-v3-8M-Cache-3_10-GHz

Four cores, four threads, around the same price as your typical i5.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75055/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1240-v3-8M-Cache-3_40-GHz

Four cores, eight threads, less than $300. The only difference is that these are called Xeon instead of Core.

Yeah, but when I was building my current server/NAS box, I had an extra Haswell i5 sitting around...

 

[Sequences]

Yeah, but when I was building my current server/NAS box, I had an extra Haswell i5 sitting around...

Ah, well you can't blame Intel for that.

I'm experimenting with FreeNAS myself right now. I have it running on a T61 Thinkpad:

1. Intel Core2Duo T9300
2. 4GB DDR2, no ECC
3. On a laptop from 2008
4. 2x WD Black 750GB

I break four out of the seven DO NOT DO list on the 9.3 documentation page.

Don't kill me, runs away...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Don't kill me, runs away...

Heh, what do you think this is, the FreeNAS forums? Piffle.

If you want to use the server for multiple things (plugins), switching from ZFS to UFS will free up most of your memory. Don't know if the latest FreeNAS still supports that though... :'(