I’m looking for recommendations on a Mobo/CPU for a high-reliability NAS build for storing irreplaceable family photos/videos. I’m looking for fast file transfer speeds (in the 50MB - 10GB file size range) and don’t plan to run any dockers (yet…). I will be using 6x 16TB Seagate Exos (SATA) drives in 3-way mirrors (for speed and reliability), to give me a total of 32TB of useful storage. I expect this system to last me 10 years.
General requirements:
-At least 1x 10GBe interface to my desktop (for photo viewing/editing) and 1x 1GBe to my home GBe network. Open to using a NIC, but ideally the Mobo would support 10GBe on its own.
-At least 8x SATA ports (for the 6x HDDs and 2x boot SSDs)
-M.2 interface for L2ARC (~512GB)
-At least 64GB ECC RAM (preferably not SODIMM or DDR5 to save on cost)
-Case will be either the Jonsbo N3 (Mini-ITX) or Yufu Seat 6-Bay (uATX)
-Low power draw highly preferred
-Mobo + CPU ideally under $500 combined
My top picks for Mobo are as follows:
ASRock E3C246D4U2-2T (uATX) - Affordable at ~$240, but the Xeon CPUs seem to be expensive and power hungry
ASRock E3C246D4I-2T (Mini-ITX) - Greater support for cheaper CPUs, but Mobo is hard to find
ASRock E3C256D4I-2T (Mini-ITX) - Greater support for cheaper CPUs, but Mobo is hard to find
ASRock EC266D2I-2T (Mini-ITX) - DDR5 RAM is expensive and Mobo is limited to 64GB
I’m a novice when it comes to selecting a Mobo/CPU combination, so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
You won’t saturate a 10 GbE link with two mirrors, and can probably go for a 6-wide raidz2 for added capacity (at the expense of IOPS). What is the “fast” part, and what is L2ARC intended for? Persistent metadata L2ARC?
Mirrorring boot is overkill for home use.
Low power with 8 SATA ports would be an A2SDi board, but an A2SDi-H-TF with on-board 10 GbE will be over $500.
I haven’t check the price for used Xeon E-2100/2200 recently, but if 64 GB RAM is enough, the board can take a Core i3-8100/9100 (ECC) and these are dirt cheap. Core i3 and Xeon E have low idle power.
Exact same CPUs as E3C246D4U2 above…
I doubt that Xeon E-2300 is “cheaper” than E-2200.
Unless you do not have easy access to the system (unlikely from what I read), I suggest going with a single boot drive while keeping another as spare along a config backup.
Do note that 3x 2-way mirrors for IOPS is still less important than having your working set inside the RAM[1]: running L2ARC might actually be more harmful to this objective.
You likely want to have at least 128 GB for video editing. Depending on your file sizes, 512 GB could be required… but since I am and idiot and can’t read, please consider this as simple knowledge sharing.
Do you really need 6x HDDs worth of photographies? You are likely better suited going with 2 or more SSDs if you don’t require tons of storage space.
which should be your first requirement once you decide to go HDDs vs SSDs for video editing. ↩︎
If you truly want to saturate a 10 gig connection for photos you’re going to need way more than six disks. Photos and smaller files really dragged down the copy times. If you went ssds, that would definitely help. Workflow wise are you copying them off of an SD card and then dumping them to your PC and then transferring them to the server? If you’re trying to copy straight off of an SD card, it might not matter the speed because you’re going to be limited by your SD card.
Just for some comparison wise I have and a TrueNAS system with 8 disks in a z2 fashion. If I copy a large solid file like a video to the NAS I can see the transfer speed start at about a gig or slightly over 1 gigabyte a second, but then it does fall off to roughly six to 700 megabytes a second sustained for the rest of the copy. If I copy a bunch of small files it may be less.
You’re not going to see any benefit from the L2ARC Unless you’re editing the same files over and over, just put in as much ram as you can and call it good enough. You could possibly benefit from the metadata special vdev, etc but 512GB isn’t enough for those based on your estimated pool size and they would need to be mirrored and ideally have power protection. I really wouldn’t bother unless you have significant resources to throw at the build.
To simplify your mobile and CPU choices, I would seriously just recommend you go with the IX systems mini series xl series. If you want more drives for speed the MiniR is really nice. 10GE is built in and would make it simple to connect directly to a 10G switch with your desktop & home network.
