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I’m very much interested in building a low power home server with one of these chips, but I’m wondering how I support a large disk array? I’m not interested in

I’m very much interested in building a low power home server with one of these chips, but I’m wondering how I support a large disk array? I’m not interested in an existing NAS setup. I’d like to do it myself.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
What would you do normally? How do these change anything?
zlynx 6y ago
To support a large disk array you just need a few things. - Lots of drive connectors. - That can be an 8 port SATA motherboard. - A SATA HBA card. I've seen some with up to 24 ports, or some of these support port expanders which you would generally plug one cable into a hot-swap box of 2 to 4 drives. - A SAS HBA card. More expensive but you can use SAS drives with enterprise features. If you're okay with used drives you can sometimes find deals on 10 drives at a time at 25% of the new drive cost. - Lots of power connectors and a good PSU. If you have 8 SATA drives you need 8 SATA drive power connectors. Or you use hot-swap boxes and plug each one into one power connector, but watch the totals and remember drive spin-up can use 4-5 times as much power than normal. Numbers I've seen are 8W per active drive and 35W (maximum) for drive startup. But at any rate for large disk arrays the CPU can be ignored because almost anything will work. Hard disks are slow enough that you need like, 20 of them before the CPU speed starts to matter. With SSDs you can max out the controllers and PCIe lanes and even RAM bandwidth all too easily.
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I recently built a Celeron J4105 system for a NAS/server/HTPC, in a compact Fractal Node 304 case. The ASRock J4105-ITX has four SATA 3 ports and a PCIe slot, to which I added a 2-port SATA 3.0 controller. Total six disks, which fits in the very compact case. I run a 120GB SSD for the system, and a random assortment of 2-3TB disks for storage, in a Btrfs RAID1 pool. All in, about 2/3rds the price I would have paid for a 4-disk Synology NAS. You can get micro-ATX boards with 6-10 SATA 3 ports, and PCIe board with basically as many SATA ports as you're willing to pay for.
AdrianB1 6y ago
There is nothing different versus a regular Ryzen 3x00 CPU. If you want many drives and good performance you need to use add-in SATA or SAS controllers instead of the on-board SATA controller that is fairly slow; it is good for one disk at a time, but slow for multiple disk access like a raid-z3 array w. ZFS. In this case the limit is what controller you use (one can find sh LSI SAS controllers at good price and good compatibility; see the Freenas.org forums for more info) and how many. For the "how many" part the number of available PCIe lanes depends mostly on the chipset, the CPUs have 24 in total - 4 to the chipset, 20 available to use. This is where the difference between B450 and X570, for example, can make a difference. The graphics part of the APU is not relevant for a NAS, but it can be if you also do transcoding or any GPU assisted work.
- zlynx 6y ago
  The standard controllers included on my ASUS Pro x370 board show you don't need a add-in controller. It's got 8 ports on the board, and when I do btrfs scrubs the 6 HDDs get 760 MiB/s and the 2 SATA SSDs get 1.05 GiB/s. The scrubs start at the same time each week so it's pretty obvious the SATA controllers on that motherboard can handle at least 2 GiB/s. I've honestly never seen a motherboard with SATA-3 6 Gbps controllers so bad that they couldn't handle a full 500 MB/s on every port. If there is a bottleneck it would be the connection to the board chipset from the CPU. Ryzen and its board support doesn't seem to have any problems here. Especially not if the board and CPU are able to use PCIe 4.0.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    My B450 board with Ryzen 2700 has only 4 usable SATA ports (if a M.2 drive is connected, the SATA ports 5 and 6 are disabled) and the 4 disk scrub in FreeNAS is fairly slow compared to the sum of the speed of each drive. Heavy FreeNAS users confirmed many times on the forum that the performance of a dedicated controller is visibly (not only benchmark measurable) better than the onboard SATA. I did not test, personally, just pointed to the FreeNAS forums.

CyberDildonics 6y ago

What would you do normally? How do these change anything?

zlynx 6y ago

To support a large disk array you just need a few things. - Lots of drive connectors. - That can be an 8 port SATA motherboard. - A SATA HBA card. I've seen some with up to 24 ports, or some of these support port expanders which you would generally plug one cable into a hot-swap box of 2 to 4 drives. - A SAS HBA card. More expensive but you can use SAS drives with enterprise features. If you're okay with used drives you can sometimes find deals on 10 drives at a time at 25% of the new drive cost. - Lots of power connectors and a good PSU. If you have 8 SATA drives you need 8 SATA drive power connectors. Or you use hot-swap boxes and plug each one into one power connector, but watch the totals and remember drive spin-up can use 4-5 times as much power than normal. Numbers I've seen are 8W per active drive and 35W (maximum) for drive startup. But at any rate for large disk arrays the CPU can be ignored because almost anything will work. Hard disks are slow enough that you need like, 20 of them before the CPU speed starts to matter. With SSDs you can max out the controllers and PCIe lanes and even RAM bandwidth all too easily.

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I recently built a Celeron J4105 system for a NAS/server/HTPC, in a compact Fractal Node 304 case. The ASRock J4105-ITX has four SATA 3 ports and a PCIe slot, to which I added a 2-port SATA 3.0 controller. Total six disks, which fits in the very compact case. I run a 120GB SSD for the system, and a random assortment of 2-3TB disks for storage, in a Btrfs RAID1 pool. All in, about 2/3rds the price I would have paid for a 4-disk Synology NAS. You can get micro-ATX boards with 6-10 SATA 3 ports, and PCIe board with basically as many SATA ports as you're willing to pay for.

AdrianB1 6y ago

There is nothing different versus a regular Ryzen 3x00 CPU. If you want many drives and good performance you need to use add-in SATA or SAS controllers instead of the on-board SATA controller that is fairly slow; it is good for one disk at a time, but slow for multiple disk access like a raid-z3 array w. ZFS. In this case the limit is what controller you use (one can find sh LSI SAS controllers at good price and good compatibility; see the Freenas.org forums for more info) and how many. For the "how many" part the number of available PCIe lanes depends mostly on the chipset, the CPUs have 24 in total - 4 to the chipset, 20 available to use. This is where the difference between B450 and X570, for example, can make a difference. The graphics part of the APU is not relevant for a NAS, but it can be if you also do transcoding or any GPU assisted work.

zlynx 6y ago
The standard controllers included on my ASUS Pro x370 board show you don't need a add-in controller. It's got 8 ports on the board, and when I do btrfs scrubs the 6 HDDs get 760 MiB/s and the 2 SATA SSDs get 1.05 GiB/s. The scrubs start at the same time each week so it's pretty obvious the SATA controllers on that motherboard can handle at least 2 GiB/s. I've honestly never seen a motherboard with SATA-3 6 Gbps controllers so bad that they couldn't handle a full 500 MB/s on every port. If there is a bottleneck it would be the connection to the board chipset from the CPU. Ryzen and its board support doesn't seem to have any problems here. Especially not if the board and CPU are able to use PCIe 4.0.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  My B450 board with Ryzen 2700 has only 4 usable SATA ports (if a M.2 drive is connected, the SATA ports 5 and 6 are disabled) and the 4 disk scrub in FreeNAS is fairly slow compared to the sum of the speed of each drive. Heavy FreeNAS users confirmed many times on the forum that the performance of a dedicated controller is visibly (not only benchmark measurable) better than the onboard SATA. I did not test, personally, just pointed to the FreeNAS forums.