FreeNAS for Video Archival

[Indigo]

Hey guys, I thought I'd swing by and share a recent project we had at the office. I had to spec out and build a system capable of offloading a significant portion of our video archive (and to allow growth with our other systems)

Full Specs of the system:

Case, 4U Rackmount OEM
ARK IPC-4U600 Black Server Case - Newegg.com

Motherboard, Socket FM2, AMD:
MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com

Processor, AMD:
AMD A8-5500 Trinity 3.2GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 65W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 7560D AD5500OKHJBOX - Newegg.com

Power Supply, over-spec'd to provide stable voltages:
High Current Pro HCP-750 750W TX12V v2.3 / EPS12V v2.92 SLI Certified CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply - Newegg.com

Memory:
G.SKILL Ares Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-1866C10Q-32GAB - Newegg.com

Dedicated NIC (didn't want onboard due to potential bugginess)
Intel EXPI9301CT PCI-Express Desktop Adapter Gigabit CT - Newegg.com

"Boot Drive"
ADATA Value-Driven S102 Pro Effortless Upgrade 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive (Gray) - Newegg.com

and the star of this show:
Western Digital RE WD4000FYYZ Internal Hard Drive - Newegg.com

Times Eight. Picture for evidence.

Completed Build, ready to deploy:

Total Formatted Capacity (ZFS RAID Z2) 20.9 TB of raw storage space.

We are running FreeNAS 8.3.0 on the box. It will be deployed using a File Server on our current cluster using iSCSI.

Anywho, thought you guys would like to see. Feel free to ask any questions.

Oh, and for the power minded those of you, the box idles at around 149 watts. Full load is hard to pinpoint, but during a heavy file copy, it spiked to about 220-240 watts.

 

[setishock]

What kind of videos you serving?
You're going to have heating issues with the drives so close together. The air flow is going to be restricted between them. The two toward the top of the pic and the one at the bottom are out of the airflow altogether.
IMO you need to have another box for four of the drives. You can stack them and use a separate power supply along with 24 or 36 inch sata cables to connect them to the mother board. Stagger them one drive, empty bay, one drive, empty bay.

Nice little hotrod as far as storage goes. But you needed to have paid closer attention to how you are going to keep that hardware cool. I've built several dual box setups. Board and optical drive on separate PSU while the hard drives were in another box on their own PSU and just used longer drive cables to connect them. And the boxes temps were easy to control.

 

[Indigo]

If this were a home build, I'd agree with you 100%. However, this system sits in our data center - temperature controlled room operating at 65 degrees F and 50% RH. This is the ONLY reason I allowed the build to come together with such an "anemic" fan setup in the case. I also didn't want a full tower case like the Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra (which I have at home, I use it for an ESXi host) since this one would allow us to rackmount it.


This is an archival server - not user heavy, doesn't need to serve anything up except as needed by the library resource guy.

 

[setishock]

Ah I see. Mind if I store a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in your server room?

 

[Indigo]

Our California guys keep beer in theirs, so why not.

 

[jmacavali]

I guess if you like "soft" ice cream and warm beer it would be ok...LOL!

 

[Indigo]

I guess if you like "soft" ice cream and warm beer it would be ok...LOL!

Bingo!