[DrDaxxy]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on a new NAS/HTPC build for my room, and I'd like some opinions on my hardware choices.

First of all: I know running XBMC on the same box that contains all my drives is considered a bad idea, please don't lecture me on this

CPU: Core i3-4130T
Case: Fractal Define R4
Mainboard: Asrock Z87 Extreme6
Boot SSD: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo
RAM: 8GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR3-1600 CL11 (KVR16N11/8)
BluRay writer: LG BH16NS40
GPU: NVIDIA G210 (already owned)
I have one PCI TV tuner, and may add another (either PCI or USB).

HDDs are mix-and-match. Yes, I have a use for all 8 of them - I need to make two (temporary) copies of my 4 previous drives totalling 5.5TB, so I need ~11TB + ZFS RAID spare in addition, and would like to keep using my old drives as long as possible. Partition-level RAID, in case you're wondering how I'm planning to integrate different-size drives into that.

As for the PSU, 500-600W seems about right, judging by various online calculators - does this sound reasonable, and do you guys have any suggestions?

And about the CPU cooler, I really don't know. Got any ideas for what I might put on there? I'm not planning to do anything more resource intensive than HTPC stuff (XBMC, file storage, downloading) and I'd like to keep this as quiet as possible since I probably won't be able to move this out of my room. I assume the HDDs are the bigger noisemaker here? Again, if anyone has an idea how I could keep the noise level down, or more soundproof cases, it'd be much appreciated

I gotta say though, this feels like overkill. The only reason I'm going for a ~gamer~ mainboard is that I can't find anything more modest that still has 10 SATA ports. 8GB RAM seems like a lot too, but I hear you need a lot to get reasonable performance on ZFS, is that true?
Perhaps there's also a more efficient alternative to the i3?

Thanks in advance for your help

[CaptainPsycho]

First of all: I know running XBMC on the same box that contains all my drives is considered a bad idea, please don't lecture me on this

Bad idea is relative, my nas is an xbmc player too. Why use 2 boxes in one room ...?

CPU: Core i3-4130T
Case: Fractal Define R4
Mainboard: Asrock Z87 Extreme6
Boot SSD: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo
RAM: 8GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR3-1600 CL11 (KVR16N11/8)
BluRay writer: LG BH16NS40
GPU: NVIDIA G210 (already owned)
I have one PCI TV tuner, and may add another (either PCI or USB).

You won't need the extra gpu. This would be just a waste of energy. The internal gpu of the i3 is capable of everything you want to do.

HDDs are mix-and-match. Yes, I have a use for all 8 of them - I need to make two (temporary) copies of my 4 previous drives totalling 5.5TB, so I need ~11TB + ZFS RAID spare in addition, and would like to keep using my old drives as long as possible. Partition-level RAID, in case you're wondering how I'm planning to integrate different-size drives into that.

As for the PSU, 500-600W seems about right, judging by various online calculators - does this sound reasonable, and do you guys have any suggestions?

A good 400W will be enough.

And about the CPU cooler, I really don't know. Got any ideas for what I might put on there? I'm not planning to do anything more resource intensive than HTPC stuff (XBMC, file storage, downloading) and I'd like to keep this as quiet as possible since I probably won't be able to move this out of my room. I assume the HDDs are the bigger noisemaker here? Again, if anyone has an idea how I could keep the noise level down, or more soundproof cases, it'd be much appreciated

The stock intel cooler is quite ok. The hdds will be louder then the cooler cause 8 of them will vibrate a bit.

I gotta say though, this feels like overkill. The only reason I'm going for a ~gamer~ mainboard is that I can't find anything more modest that still has 10 SATA ports. 8GB RAM seems like a lot too, but I hear you need a lot to get reasonable performance on ZFS, is that true?
Perhaps there's also a more efficient alternative to the i3?

The i3 seems to be good.

Do you wan't to use zfsonlinux.org ?

I've buld a nas4free box recently and yes zfs can eat up your memory.
If you don't use deduplication and configure a reasonable prefetch value 4 GB for zfs will be enough.

On a older CORE dual core pentium 1.8GHZ, 5GB RAM with 3x WD RED 3TB in RAIDZ1 i get with dd read about 230MB/s, write about 180MB/s, over Gbit ethernet and Samba/CIFS 102MB/s read, 80MB/s write. I guess the bottleneck here is the cpu.

[DrDaxxy]

You won't need the extra gpu. This would be just a waste of energy. The internal gpu of the i3 is capable of everything you want to do.

I've been under the impression that Intel GPU decoding on Linux/XBMC was still finicky. This isn't really the most important part anyway, I'll try it without the G210 first, can always throw it in if necessary.

A good 400W will be enough.

I gotta say, 400W for 8 HDDs (everything between 5400rpm low power and 7200rpm drives), an i3, a BluRay writer, an SSD, one or two TV tuners and possibly a dedicated GPU seems a bit low, are you sure about this?

The i3 seems to be good.

Do you wan't to use zfsonlinux.org ?

I've buld a nas4free box recently and yes zfs can eat up your memory.
If you don't use deduplication and configure a reasonable prefetch value 4 GB for zfs will be enough.

On a older CORE dual core pentium 1.8GHZ, 5GB RAM with 3x WD RED 3TB in RAIDZ1 i get with dd read about 230MB/s, write about 180MB/s, over Gbit ethernet and Samba/CIFS 102MB/s read, 80MB/s write. I guess the bottleneck here is the cpu.

Haven't quite decided between a FreeNAS VM and just running zfsonlinux without virtualisation. Interesting statistics. Really all I care about is getting acceptable speeds on network transfers and the occasional untouched BD rip not stuttering, so that sounds like 8GB is more than plenty

Thanks for your help

[CaptainPsycho]

You won't need the extra gpu. This would be just a waste of energy. The internal gpu of the i3 is capable of everything you want to do.

I've been under the impression that Intel GPU decoding on Linux/XBMC was still finicky. This isn't really the most important part anyway, I'll try it without the G210 first, can always throw it in if necessary.

This works really well on intel for one or two years now.

A good 400W will be enough.

I gotta say, 400W for 8 HDDs (everything between 5400rpm low power and 7200rpm drives), an i3, a BluRay writer, an SSD, one or two TV tuners and possibly a dedicated GPU seems a bit low, are you sure about this?

I've got 2x2,5" HDD, 11x3,5" WD Green, a 65W i3, 2x memory sticks, 1 TV-Tuner, 1 HBA Raid Adapter running well with a 400W 80+ gold power supply.

8HDD ~ 80W
SSD ~ 5W
BlueRay ~ 15W
i3 ~ 35W
TV-Tuners ~ 20W
Board ~ 30W
extra GPU ~ 30W
Fans ~ 25W

summs up to max 240W

So i think 400W is quite save. And linux is spinning up the hdds one after another, so there is no need to consider that.

The i3 seems to be good.

Do you wan't to use zfsonlinux.org ?

I've buld a nas4free box recently and yes zfs can eat up your memory.
If you don't use deduplication and configure a reasonable prefetch value 4 GB for zfs will be enough.

On a older CORE dual core pentium 1.8GHZ, 5GB RAM with 3x WD RED 3TB in RAIDZ1 i get with dd read about 230MB/s, write about 180MB/s, over Gbit ethernet and Samba/CIFS 102MB/s read, 80MB/s write. I guess the bottleneck here is the cpu.

Haven't quite decided between a FreeNAS VM and just running zfsonlinux without virtualisation. Interesting statistics. Really all I care about is getting acceptable speeds on network transfers and the occasional untouched BD rip not stuttering, so that sounds like 8GB is more than plenty

Thanks for your help

I'm using mdadm raid6 with lvm and ext4 at the moment. This is very flexible. You can add and remove disks from the array quite freely. This is not so easy on ZFS.

If you don't need compression, deduplication, snapshots ... you might consider mdadm. It is a lot faster and less cpu and memory consuming.

Haven't had a look on BTRFS yet.

[DrDaxxy]

I'm using mdadm raid6 with lvm and ext4 at the moment. This is very flexible. You can add and remove disks from the array quite freely. This is not so easy on ZFS.

If you don't need compression, deduplication, snapshots ... you might consider mdadm. It is a lot faster and less cpu and memory consuming.

Haven't had a look on BTRFS yet.

What I'm planning to do is essentially this: http://www.cod3r.com/2010/04/zfs-on-diff...zed-disks/
Very experimental, I know. Absolutely not something I'd do in a professional environment.
And I don't think you can do this with mdadm (or any other RAID solution, really).

[CaptainPsycho]

What I'm planning to do is essentially this: http://www.cod3r.com/2010/04/zfs-on-diff...zed-disks/
Very experimental, I know. Absolutely not something I'd do in a professional environment.
And I don't think you can do this with mdadm (or any other RAID solution, really).

Quite sick setup.

And yes you can do this too with mdadm.
Just create raid5s and raid1 (when only 2 partitions are available) and then stripe them in raid0.
When expanding you can convert the raid1 to raid5 with just 2 disks and then add the new disk later.

[DrDaxxy]

Haven't even thought of nesting raids, neat idea. I think I'm gonna do that, thanks

[CaptainPsycho]

And to confuse you finally i'll throw http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/ into the ring.

Could be that this is even the simplest and most power saving solution for you.

[DrDaxxy]

I know about SnapRAID, but I don't want snapshots

[CaptainPsycho]

What came to my mind was the io multiplication penalty this solution has. With 4 different disk sizes like in your link the 2 biggest disk will have to do 3-times the io of the smallest disk. With consideration of sync you can theoretically reach 4*1/3 io minus 1/3 for the parity drive resulting in max 1x io performance of one drive max.

Guess this is the price for maximum storage space available.

And it should be still enough for streaming 1 or 2 movies.

With a bigger than standard read ahead and stripe cache value you can do at least something.

Not shure if NCQ will make it better or worse ...

BUT this would only be the worst case szenario if a file is fragmented over all 3 raids. ;-)