New m-ITX build, have questions regarding integrated CPU and SATA card

Hi all,

I'm planning a new NAS and am leaning heavily towards unRAID due primarily to its easy expandability, and (perhaps) lower hardware requirements when compared to the ZFS-based systems.

Aim 1. low cost and low volume.  After that: Eventually I want >12 TB of double parity storage, primarily for movies and photos. I want it to saturate a 1 Gb/s link particularly when scrolling through photos in lightroom etc. All of my clients have small PCIe storage on board, mostly Apple laptops, so they need to store their big data on the NAS. I currently use a Mac Mini with a 1.25 TB Fusion Drive that I have outgrown and it reads at about 75 MB/s. I would like faster than that for the next machine. I'm not too fussed about VMs etc

Proposed build

CPU: Pentium J3710 - 4 Cores, 2 MB L2 etc

Mobo: Asrock J3710-ITX - 1 PCIe 2.0 x1, 1 Half-Size Mini-PCIe, 4 SATA3, 6 USB 3.0

Memory: 4GB DDR3 - 1600 Mhz

SATA Controller: SATA-6Gbps-RAID-Controller-Card~PEXSAT34RH'>Startech 4? Port PCIe? SATA III ?Card

Cache: 2 x Kingston SSDNow UV400 128 GB in a software RAID 1

Parity Drives: 2 x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM

Storage Drive(s): 2 x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM. for 8 TB initially. N.B. My plan is to just add drives as I need more storage. I suppose with this build I can have up to six HDDs: 2 parity, 4 storage (16 TB), and the 2 cache drives.

Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case - 6 x 3.5" HDD bays, double sided tape for SSDs 

PSU: Corsair 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply

Questions

1) Is double parity desirable for a system with only four storage drives? Will I be achieving anything other than adding complexity and (perhaps) increasing rebuild times? I mean redundancy is important too me, as other than building a second box I don't know how I'm going to backup 16 TB! That's a separate discussion however.

2) Is the Startech SATA controller suitable. I;ve been reading about flashing LSI cards to IT mode and that sounds far too complicated for what I'm trying to achieve? Does anybody know if the Startech card will play ncie with unRAID? I have read the manual and it doesn't mention either SMART or IT mode so I'm none the wiser...

3) Will I be able to saturate a 1 Gb/s network? What sort of speeds could I be expecting from server --> client?

4) Are 7200 rpm drives worth it on 1Gb/s network and with a SSD cache? If so I can save a lot of money with 5400 rpm drives? What about 7200 rpm drives for the parity drives? Any benefits to be had?

5) Is that CPU, ram and board ok? Quad core @ 2.6 GHz sounds like enough to me, same for 4 GB RAM. The CPU supports 2 x SATA 3, the board has a second controller for a further 2 x SATA 3 and the Star tech card supports a further 4 ports (and up to seven drives apparently )

Thanks heaps everyone

Oh, one more quick question, can the storage array use btrfs in unRAID? And are there any benefits to this other than it being "cool"

Cheers,

Tom

1) Is double parity desirable for a system with only four storage drives? Will I be achieving anything other than adding complexity and (perhaps) increasing rebuild times? I mean redundancy is important too me, as other than building a second box I don't know how I'm going to backup 16 TB! That's a separate discussion however.

Dual parity clearly provides a higher level of redundancy that can significantly reduce the likelihood of a failed rebuild, no matter how many data drives you have.  Clearly it's more likely that you'd need that 2nd parity drive with more drives -- but it's still a nice extra bit of insurance for the cost of one extra drive.  It doesn't really add any complexity from the user's perspective; and rebuild times will be the same as with single parity.

r.e. "... other than building a second box I don't know how I'm going to backup 16 TB! " => that's perhaps a "separate discussion" ... but remember that UnRAID -- or ANY RAID system -- is NOT a substitute for backing up your data.  Whether it's single or dual parity, you could still have a catastrophic system failure that would result in lost data, so you should ALWAYS have good backups of data you don't want to lose.

2) Is the Startech SATA controller suitable. I;ve been reading about flashing LSI cards to IT mode and that sounds far too complicated for what I'm trying to achieve? Does anybody know if the Startech card will play ncie with unRAID? I have read the manual and it doesn't mention either SMART or IT mode so I'm none the wiser...

Yes, the StarTech is fine.  That plus your onboard ports gives you all the SATA ports you need.

3) Will I be able to saturate a 1 Gb/s network? What sort of speeds could I be expecting from server --> client?

Yes, for reads.  Writes should also be that fast as long as they're to cache-enabled shares.

4) Are 7200 rpm drives worth it on 1Gb/s network and with a SSD cache? If so I can save a lot of money with 5400 rpm drives? What about 7200 rpm drives for the parity drives? Any benefits to be had?

The slower NAS drives (e.g. WD Reds) are fine -- they still have data rates well above what a Gb network can support.  You may want a 7200rpm parity drive if you expect to have multiple clients writing at the same time ... but even that isn't necessary if all of your shares are going to be cache-enabled.

5) Is that CPU, ram and board ok? Quad core @ 2.6 GHz sounds like enough to me, same for 4 GB RAM. The CPU supports 2 x SATA 3, the board has a second controller for a further 2 x SATA 3 and the Star tech card supports a further 4 ports (and up to seven drives apparently )

I'd go with 8GB or 16GB of RAM ... UnRAID will definitely take advantage of it.    I gather you don't plan to use VM's or Dockers, so the CPU is fine (it's a relatively low-end CPU, but is also VERY power efficient and is fine for the usage you've outlined).

One other thought:  The Corsair 430 is a very low-end PSU, and is also an ATX form factor, which I do NOT recommend for SFX cases.  Although the Node 304 can accommodate it, an SFX unit will give you notably better airflow in the case as well as more "working room" for cabling, etc.    SFX units are simply a much better choice for these small cases.    I'd use a Silverstone or Corsair SFX unit.

To comment on what Garycase said, I also recommend a SFX power supply for the Node 304. I ran into issues with my ATX power supply where there was interference with the motherboard SATA connectors because they came out the side of the motherboard instead of the top.

Silverstone recently updated their bronze series SFX power supplies to accommodate larger (quieter) fans. Here is a very recent review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11070/the-silverstone-st30sf-st45sf-sfx-psu-review

I've got the 450 modular in mine, but I'm sure the 300 bronze would be sufficient for 6 spinning drives and a low powered CPU. Either way you will need to get some MOLEX to SATA power adapters to accommodate 6+ SATA devices. Don't buy the cheap (Less than $1) ones because they can be a fire hazard!

For my mITX motherboard and Node 304, I only use a single parity drive and feel very comfortable without the need for a second parity.

Parity is like insurance. No such thing as too much insurance. Issue is the cost e.g. replacing 8GB with 10GB for extra 8GB vs simply using a 8GB parity as data.

Thanks everyone for the excellent advice.

SFX power supply is great idea. I use a 500 W Silverstone in my m-ITX gaming PC (7700k, GTX1070 etc).

I will consider more RAM for sure, not much price difference between 4 GB and 8 GB really, and using 5400 rpm drives saves me a bit of money compared to my budgeted 7200 rpm drives.

The backup issue is a bit of a conundrum to me. I don't mind paying for CrashPlan or similar, but my upload speed is only 187 KB/s so uploading multiple TB to the "cloud" would be.... steady. I do have a Lacie Raid box thing with two 4 TB drives in it which I currently run in RAID1. That would keep me going for a while anyway 

Thanks again.

For a backup solution, you can get some really big hard drives these days.  A USB 3 enclosure with a single 8TB WD Red or a 10TB Ironwolf and a solution to backup new/modified files is easy to implement, lends itself to offsite backup, and is less costly than a full backup server.  It won't work for a 70TB server but seems like it could help you for now.

Thanks everyone for the excellent advice.

 

SFX power supply is great idea. I use a 500 W Silverstone in my m-ITX gaming PC (7700k, GTX1070 etc).

 

I will consider more RAM for sure, not much price difference between 4 GB and 8 GB really, and using 5400 rpm drives saves me a bit of money compared to my budgeted 7200 rpm drives.

 

The backup issue is a bit of a conundrum to me. I don't mind paying for CrashPlan or similar, but my upload speed is only 187 KB/s so uploading multiple TB to the "cloud" would be.... steady. I do have a Lacie Raid box thing with two 4 TB drives in it which I currently run in RAID1. That would keep me going for a while anyway 

 

Thanks again.

Crashplan, in my mind, is a good-to-have. For a typical personal use case, an offsite back-up should be the last resort.

I would suggest to divide your content into categories to help prioritisation. You would only need offsite backup for the most critical (e.g. your baby's pictures). For most people, it shouldn't even reach the 1GB range so should be reasonably possible to sync up to Google Drive, for example, within a reasonable amount of time.

You can actually backup data within the same unRAID server. I know some will frowned upon this but not everyone has gigabit symmetric Internet and budget for 2 servers.

All you need to do is to reserve 1 disk for backup. Then set up your shares to always exclude this disk and 1 backup share to only use this disk. Then set up a cron job to do a nightly rsync of some select folders into this backup share. It will be slower but the backup also has parity protection.

A variation of the above method is to use an external USB 3.0 (or better) disk and mount via Unassigned Devices. It will add a bit more control in term of isolating the backup e.g. from virus and stuff. But then proper share security set up should be able to reasonably achieve that too.

... You can actually backup data within the same unRAID server. I know some will frowned upon this but not everyone has gigabit symmetric Internet and budget for 2 servers.

This is NOT a backup.  If you can afford a dedicated disk for a backup, but can't afford a system to house it (e.g. a 2nd server), then simply use attach it via an external dock (eSATA or USB) when you're doing a backup; and then store it in a safe place in-between backups.    [e.g. a Wiebetech "drive box" -- https://www.amazon.com/DriveBox-Anti-Static-Storage-3-5-inch-10-pack/dp/B004UALLPE ]    You can attach the dock to your UnRAID server via the unattached devices plugin; or just attach it to one of your PC's and backup over the network.

But multiple copies of your data on the SAME server is NOT a backup.

Ugg... So I've mucked up.

I went ahead and bought all of the bits noted in the OP, other than changed the drives from WD Reds to Hitachi 7200 rpm NAS drives.

Buutttt the Startech card is a x2 card, which Ive never even heard of, neither has Wikipedia. Obviously the Asrock board only has a x1 slot which leaves me in a bit of a conundrum.

I understand if I remove the end of the PCIe slot I will be able to insert the card and it will run at x1 speed, ~500 MB/s in each direction. Now even if I get another card that is 1x I will still be limited to that speed so not much point really.

So my plan is to modify the slot to put my new x2 card in and run it at 500 MB/s.

Question for you all now: Which drives would I be best running on the SATA card rather than the Motherboard, bearing in mind the speed limit. Though realistically the whole network is only gigabit so it can only do 125 MB/s transfers so perhaps I'm blowing it out of proportion???

I'm thinking running it as follows:

Cache 1: Mobo

Cache 2: Mobo

Parity 1: Mobo

Parity 2: Mobo

Array 1-2: SATA Card at x1

Array 3-4: To be installed in the future, but will have to go on the SATA card.

My thinking is that the cache drives could use 500 MB/s each when transferring to the array so put them on the mobo, and the parity drives will be getting utilised more than the array drives so put them on the mobo also.

The array drives on the card means that I can have four clients simultaneously reading from the array over the network (4 x 125 MB/s best case) before the card x1 becomes a bottle neck.

Thoughts? Am I on the right track?

Next, does anyone know a good method for removing the end out of the PCI slot? 

Your link in the OP didn't go to the card you were using -- it goes to a generic Startech site.  Otherwise I would have commented on that if I'd seen it was an x2 card.

You're correct that modifying the slot should let it run at x1 speed, although I'd be more inclined to just buy a 4-port x1 card to avoid modifying the motherboard (thus killing the warranty).

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124093

Running 4 drives on an x1 slot will indeed bottleneck the drives, but only when more than 2 of them are in use at the same time => realistically this simply means your parity checks and drive rebuilds will be throttled; but virtually all other array usage will be at full speed.  So, as you've already noted, it's not really a big deal.

... Next, does anyone know a good method for removing the end out of the PCI slot? 

If you really want to do that rather than buying another card, get a Dremel tool and VERY carefully cut off the end of the slot with one of the cutting discs.

Thanks for your help, it really is appreciated! I should've checked the links when I posted. Nevermind.

So I decided to fix this properly.

I have swapped the motherboard for an Asrock H110M-ITX and have purchased an Intel Celeron G3900 and 8 GB Kingston DDR4-2133 RAM.

That way I can run the SATA card at full speed through the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, keep my warranty (and PCIe slot) intact and pickup a nice CPU performance increase to boot! All for the exact same price as the integrated board. Only downside is more power consumption, but I still believe the 300 W PSU will be adequate.

Cheers,

Tom

A MUCH better fix -- and an appreciable increase in power as well.  I suspect it will also idle at a VERY low power consumption -- the Socket 1151 chips and boards are VERY good at this.

Ok so the speed of PCIe 3.0 went to my head! I found a cheap second hand LSI 9207-8i HBA that runs on PCIe 3.0 x8. I've tested it and it appears to be working OK. It also allows me infinite (well for my needs anyway) expansion for the future. And major bonus marks for already being in IT mode.

Just need to wait for the cables to come into stock before I can test it with some drives.