My first build. Thinking about building a backup server based on atom.

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dopeelf

Hey all!

This is my first foray into building something myself and was thinking about building a server for backups. I plan on using ZFS for the filesystem (haven't done any research yet but will) and probably unison for the software. Well, anyway, I put together some hardware which I think will work together and with FreeBSD but being a little insecure I just wanted to post it and and see what you think. Here goes:

Asus AT5IONT-I Mini ITX MB - Atom D525
Crucial 4GB DDR3 PC-10600 1333MHz CL9 (CT2KIT25664BA1339) (2x2GB)
Fractal Design Array R2 (300W)
HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SAS/SATA 8-channel (PCI-E)
OCZ Internal SSD 60GB Vertex Plus Series SATA II 2.5" (OCZSSD2-1VTXPL60G)
Deltaco Multilane SAS-kabel SFF-8484 to 4xSATA 7-pin 50cm
Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB (IntelliPower / 64MB Cache / Sata 6Gb/s / NCQ)

Cheers
Pasi
 
Just tried a search on the rocketraid and it seems their drivers are old so I need to find another card. Any suggestions?
 
Get rid of WDC Green sh!t and get WDC Red drives. As for RAM, get 8GB if possible, if not, 4GB will also do.

Also, get AMD E350 motherboard which has 4 or 6 SATA ports and forget about that controller.
 
vermaden said:
Get rid of WDC Green sh!t and get WDC Red drives. As for RAM, get 8GB if possible, if not, 4GB will also do.
Click to expand...

The motherboard only supports 4Gb, maybe that's a bit small for ZFS? I do plan on running it headless so no overhead for x11 etc.

Also, get AMD E350 motherboard which has 4 or 6 SATA ports and forget about that controller.
Click to expand...
Oh, great idea. Otherwise I was looking into getting a LSI SAS 9207-8i

Was planning on 6 drives for ZFS and the SSD for boot.
 
Why bother with a RAID controller at all? The motherboard has two SATA ports, and there are only two drives.

The Core processors have much, much more horsepower with only minimally more power used than the Atom. And that motherboard is expensive--I think you could get a low-end Core Celeron or Pentium and motherboard for the same price. There are mini-ITX motherboards for Core processors, not sure about fanless options if that's the goal. For comparison, a system with a Celeron G530 on a full ATX Z68 motherboard, 4G RAM (1.35V), 128G SSD, 250G HD, and one add-on Intel Ethernet board runs at about 37W. That's from the wall, using an 80% efficient power supply.

The Caviar Green series does not have the greatest reputation. Two of those in a mirror would be a lot safer. I've considered using different brands of cheap, big drives. So when one fails, the "warranty timer" on the other isn't also about to go. The difficulty is that similar Seagate drives also have a poor reputation. I don't necessarily agree with vermaden on the WD Red drives, they haven't been around long enough to build up a reputation. With a mirror of cheap drives, individual drives failing is not a big problem. It also looks like drives with capacities over 1T are less reliable.
 
wblock@ said:
Why bother with a RAID controller at all? The motherboard has two SATA ports, and there are only two drives.
Click to expand...
I was planning on using 6 drives for ZFS (All that will fit in that case + 1 SSD for boot)

The Core processors have much, much more horsepower with only minimally more power used than the Atom. And that motherboard is expensive--I think you could get a low-end Core Celeron or Pentium and motherboard for the same price. There are mini-ITX motherboards for Core processors, not sure about fanless options if that's the goal. For comparison, a system with a Celeron G530 on a full ATX Z68 motherboard, 4G RAM (1.35V), 128G SSD, 250G HD, and one add-on Intel Ethernet board runs at about 37W. That's from the wall, using an 80% efficient power supply.
Click to expand...
I don't think I will need that much horsepower since I will have this setup remotely (bandwidth will be the bottleneck). But that's a good point, I'll look into it. (Never built a computer before so I appreciate all the input I can get!)

The Caviar Green series does not have the greatest reputation. Two of those in a mirror would be a lot safer. I've considered using different brands of cheap, big drives. So when one fails, the "warranty timer" on the other isn't also about to go. The difficulty is that similar Seagate drives also have a poor reputation. I don't necessarily agree with vermaden on the WD Red drives, they haven't been around long enough to build up a reputation. With a mirror of cheap drives, individual drives failing is not a big problem. It also looks like drives with capacities over 1T are less reliable.
Click to expand...

Well, this is going to be my offsite backup, already have local backup. And I was planning on putting 6 of those in a ZFS raidz. But mixing them up might be a good idea.
 
dopeelf said:
The motherboard only supports 4Gb, maybe that's a bit small for ZFS? I do plan on running it headless so no overhead for x11 etc.
Click to expand...

You are limiting yourself! 4GB can get you started fine but later on you might want to use more storage. More storage, means more memory.

dopeelf said:
Oh, great idea. Otherwise I was looking into getting a LSI SAS 9207-8i

Was planning on 6 drives for ZFS and the SSD for boot.
Click to expand...

I can get up to 560MB throughput with this controller on a RAIDz2 with 8 WD 3TB RED drives.

Don't waste your SSD for booting only. Use it for a UFS2+J boot and the rest for CACHE and SWAP.
 
ok... Here goes, from what I gather I can go 2 routes, atom or celeron. So I put together 2 systems with components that I think will work together and with FreeBSD.

ATOM system:
  • Fractal Design Array R2 - (300W), Case: holds 6x3.5 + 1x2.5
  • ASUS AT4NM10T-I D425 MINI-ITX, cheapest MB I can find at my supplier for atom that has a PCIe slot.
  • Crucial 4GB DDR3 PC-10600 1333MHz CL9
  • Deltaco Multilane SAS-cable, sas -> sata cable
  • LSI SAS 9211-8i RAID Controller, mps support in kernel.
  • OCZ Intern SSD 60GB Vertex Plus Series, for boot/swap/zfs cache
  • 6x3TB cheap SATA drives, (2x WD, 2x segate, 2x whatever)

Celeron system:
  • NZXT MIDITOWER SOURCE 210 ELITE ATX WHITE, Case: holds 8x3.5
  • Chieftec A-85 Series CTB-350S 350W PSU
  • GIGABYTE GA-H61N-USB3 H61 S-1155 MINI-ITX, Cheapest motherboard I could find.
  • INTEL CELERON G440 1.6GHZ 1MB S- 1155, the one I could find that needs the least watts.
  • KINGSTON 8GB 1066MHZ DDR3 CL7, 8 Gb and room for 8 Gb more.
  • Deltaco Multilane SAS-cable, sas -> sata cable
  • LSI SAS 9211-8i RAID Controller, mps support in kernel.
  • OCZ Intern SSD 60GB Vertex Plus Series, for boot/swap/zfs cache
  • 6x3TB cheap SATA drives, (2x WD, 2x segate, 2x whatever)

Did I miss something? I am grateful for any input. :stud
 
Ooops, just noticed I was about put a mini-itx board in a m-atx case. Somehow I think that wont work. Thinking about the Gigabyte GA-H61M-S2PV Intel H61 Motherboard instead.
 
I believe you can put a mini-ITX motherboard into a micro ATX case, but more room means you aren't stuck with the limits of the mini-ITX form factor. There's room for up to full ATX in that case, and larger motherboards will have more SATA ports. The GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 I've used a couple of times now has two SATA-3 and four SATA-2 ports. That makes the expensive RAID card almost unnecessary; the SSD still needs another connection.

No experience with Chieftec power supplies, I hear they're good, but given a choice, I use Seasonic. With the power supply at the bottom, sometimes extension cables are needed for the 12V power cable.

Never tried an NZXT case, either. The Antec 300 is hard to beat, similar in size, and on sale now at, er, Nuevo Huevo. Like the NZXT, it has places for 120mm fans to blow over the hard drives, but does not include them. Sometimes the 300 "Illusion" is on sale, same case but with go-faster blue LED fans, including the two 120mm drive fans. Neither available in white, if that's a concern.

TDP (Thermal Design Power) is misleading. A processor is like a speaker, it won't draw maximum power unless needed. I picked the Celeron G530 because it's the lowest end Sandy Bridge dual core. If you plan to use encryption, going as high as an i5 would be worth it for the built-in AES-NI.

There are surely AMD equivalent motherboards and processors.

Another note about the WD Red drives. Some places have them for only a little more than the rock-bottom drives (I'd seen them before for something like double the low-end price). Actually, they seem to be out of stock pretty much everywhere.

Another note: just read that some Seagate low-end drives are not rated for 24-hour use!
 
Yeah, they want us to buy the RE4 drives which are almost double the price and the NZXT case was the cheapest case I could find that will hold a few drives. It's actually cheaper than the Antec 300 in sweden.

A lot of good information! Thanks. I never built a system before so it's a lot to learn. But I'll take my time and make sure to do my research.
 
I'm using an AMD E350 board for a home-/fileserver, but if I had to choose again I'd pick an Celeron based model. The Celeron is much more powerful and should use the same amount of power in idle (but I haven't actually measured my power usage yet). Also it looks like the E350 is not too well supported (yet), see this thread. Also I would now get a board that supports 4 DIMMs, so I could upgrade my system to 16gb RAM cheaper (the E350 boards officially support only two 4GB DIMMs but I have read reports that they do support 8GB DIMMs, but have not tried it yet).
 
vermaden said:
Get rid of WDC Green sh!t and get WDC Red drives. As for RAM, get 8GB if possible, if not, 4GB will also do.

Also, get AMD E350 motherboard which has 4 or 6 SATA ports and forget about that controller.
Click to expand...

8 GB for a backup server? Isn't that really too much ? Is it going to be a central backup server for > 10 clients?

ZFS runs fine on 4 GB or at least that's what stated on the FreeBSD handbook.
 
atmosx said:
8 GB for a backup server? Isn't that really too much ? Is it going to be a central backup server for > 10 clients?

ZFS runs fine on 4 GB or at least that's what stated on the FreeBSD handbook.
Click to expand...

I personally run my backup on 1GB RAM with FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE amd64 and ZFS v15, but I do not use deduplication or compression (Yes I need to update that box).

ZFS runs better with more RAM and RAM is cheap, if You want to use deduplication with ZFS, You will need 3GB RAM per 1TB of stored data (estimation).

You can of course have a backup server based on gmirror and UFS and have as little as 128-256MB RAM on FreeBSD, nothing prevents You from doing that.
 
atmosx said:
8 GB for a backup server? Isn't that really too much ? Is it going to be a central backup server for > 10 clients?

ZFS runs fine on 4 GB or at least that's what stated on the FreeBSD handbook.
Click to expand...

Memory planning is related to storage capacity in ZFS world.

For 1TB of storage 8 GB is too much. But if you use a RAIDz2 array consisted by 8X3TB drives then 8GB might not even be enough.

The number of clients accessing the storage and how is the storage being used, counts as well in a matter of performance mostly.
 
Hi,

If it's a backup server, do you really need the SSD for boot?

You might get a better overall result by booting from a conventional disk mirror for / and /usr, and using that SSD as a ZFS cache.

Cheers,
 
gpw928 said:
Hi,
If it's a backup server, do you really need the SSD for boot?
Click to expand...

Booting from an SSD is a waste unless you plan on using that SSD for SWAP and CACHE as well.
For a fileserver you really don't need more that a few GB to contain the OS and the software.
 
Re: My first build. Thinking about building a backup server

And it ended with:
ASRock A55M-DGS mATX, AMD A4 5300 3,4 Ghz FM2, Crucial 8GB CL9 1600Mhz Ballistix, 4 x 2 TB WD Green (zraid1), 300Gb WDC for boot.

(I had the green drives already would have gone with red drives otherwise).
 
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