[nycbug-talk] Home storage server build

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mar 4, 2012, at 9:07 PM, Jonathan wrote:

> After having 2 drives fail within hours of each other and losing yet
> another stick of RAM in my current 6 year old FreeBSD ZFS storage server
> I'm looking at building a new one next week.  If people are interested
> I'll try to keep the list up to date on what I find.
> 
> My current requirements:
> Budget - Probably $500-$1000
> Must have ECC RAM
> 
> My current hardware (that I will reuse):
> Coolmaster Stacker case w/ 850 watt power supply
> My current drive array 4x 1.5TB and 4x 2TB drives (2x ZFS RAIDZ)
> LSI SAS 3081E-R HBA
> 2x 5in4 SATA hot swap bays
> 
> My current question is what motherboards would you recommend?  Brands to
> look at or avoid or specific models are welcome.
> 
> Currently the best performance per dollar for a CPU seems to be the
> Intel E3-1230 or E3-1235 by quite a bit
> http://ark.intel.com/products/family/59137.  AMD offerings in the same
> price range don't appear to have anywhere near the performance.
> 
> I plan to put as much RAM on the board as my budget can handle.

With your budget, I'd have a look at dropping two of these in for
ZIL:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167044

Depending on what you do with the box, putting ZIL on SSD drives
can have a pretty dramatic effect.  I just did a bunch of
benchmarking on this stuff with postgresql and it was an
eye-opener.  I suspect that if you're doing anything like serving
up shares to VMs at home or anything else that could generate lots
of sync writes, you'd see a huge boost.  If it's just a simple
fileserver, then probably not worth it (although the price of SSDs
is getting low enough that $200 might be justifiable as an
"experiment").

Charles

> 
> Jonathan
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