Should I buy a used server on eBay for ZFS ?

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Aesma

[H]ard|Gawd
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So, I've been looking into making a dedicated storage server for my massive media collection for some time, based on the OpenIndiana OS. Ideally I would buy something like a Supermicro socket 2011 mobo, 8*8GB ECC RAM, and an E5-1620 CPU, along with a Norco 4224 and a good PSU, an HP expander, and later another Norco and another expander. But this ends up on the expensive side for my current finances, and rather than waiting several more months I'd like to start right now, especially since I believe it will take me months to transfer the data as I need to check it against my backups. So I'm looking at the famous cheap 16 bays DAS that can be found on eBay, and a cheap server to go with. I could start with just the server and the IBM M1015 I already got for a first 8 drives RAIDZ2 vdev, and grow from there.

I'm looking in particular at the Dell PowerEdge 2950 and 1950, with 2 dual core Xeons, 16GB ECC DDR2, and 2 PCIe 8X slots.

Does that seem powerful enough for a simple file server with up to 48*3TB drives in 4 RAIDZ2 vdevs ? I would think the Gigabit network will be the limiting factor.

Any compatibility issue between the IBM M1015 and Dell servers ?
 
Honestly, while those servers would work, I suspect you'll be memory limited in terms of performance if you're really going to be dealing with that much storage. DDR2 isn't cheap--typically quite a bit more than DDR3, in fact, so bumping either of those up to 32 or 64GB would be another expense. There is also the power consumption angle - the proposed Norco/SM setup would use considerably less power than those older Dell servers, while also being quieter. And if you want to expand beyond gigabit networking (even if it's just throwing a 4-port gig card in there for teaming/iSCSI) at some point, having only those 2 PCIe 8x slots means you'd have to find an alternative to the M1015/HP expander combo.
 
I'm also looking at same generation HP and IBM servers, some of which have more PCIe ports.

It's true that DDR2 is expensive, that's why I'm looking at servers already equipped with 16GB. I know ZFS can use all the memory it can get but what would actually happen with 16GB and lots of TB of storage ? I don't plan on using deduplication and there will be nothing going on except serving data to one computer.
 
Without dedupe and for media storage (which is not IOP intensive) 16Gb is just fine for a ZFS server - even with that many disks. ZFS needs the memory for dedupe checksum maps and for the in-memory ARC (cache) - neither of which are very important for a largely static collection like you describe.

You don't really need the dual-Xeon servers either...though they are fun to play with.
 
Yeah I don't need dual Xeon but until recently single socket servers were pretty rare. Here it's two dual cores when quad cores CPUs were available, it makes even less sense.
 
I have two pe2950 that work good, they have 3 pcie x8 slots, and then the 1 more pcie x8 if you want to do some fun cable routing (and not use the internal sata ports).

I did mount two 2.5" drives for boot disks off the motherboard sata ports in them, leaving the 6 sata ports for the large pool disks.

At home I'm using a supermicro single socket system, it works great at 4gb and 8gb, don't really see any difference between that amount of ram, with 12tb of disks.
 
Warning about the 1950 and 2950 is if you fill all the memory slots the fans are 100% speed all the time.
 
No, you have 3 pcie slots on the back, and then one pcie slot at the front for the raid card. The management controller plugs in using two 50pin cables I think they are.
 
patrickdk said:
No, you have 3 pcie slots on the back, and then one pcie slot at the front for the raid card. The management controller plugs in using two 50pin cables I think they are.
Click to expand...

Might not be the same generation I'm looking at, on every picture I can find I only see two slots together.

bds1904 said:
can't really beat this price

I use something similar at home
Click to expand...

Except that shipping to France runs in the hundreds of dollars, and then I can get slapped with about 25% tax on the total amount.

The SGI enclosures at 200$ should still be interesting under these circumstances but the servers less so.

Anyway, thanks for the answers, but I'm now looking at latest tech, since I realized that with the socket 1155 and not 2011 I didn't give up much, and could get significant benefits : slightly cheaper motherboard (X9SAE-V), dirt cheap CPU (celeron G1610), and use DDR3 I have lying around for a couple of weeks until I buy ECC RAM. Then if the CPU is lacking I can also upgrade it later.
 
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Not sure, they made two versions, a 2 and a 3, I have the 2's

But the specs on the 3's are the same.


Slots

Three total:
PCIe riser with three PCI Express slots (one 1 x 4 and two 1 x 8) -Or-
Two PCI-X 64-bit/133MHz and one PCI Express 1 x 8 slot

Yes, two slots are together, but there is one slot by itself going the other way.

http://www.stikc.com/Catalog/PowerEdge-2950
That pic must be gen3, cause it doesn;t look like mine.
 
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