freebsd stable - Aug 2017 - recommendations for file server based zfs appliance

Hi!
> Am 18.08.2017 um 14:03 schrieb Stefan Hagen <freebsd-stable-list at
textmail.me>:
> 
> * Patrick M. Hausen wrote:
>>> Am 18.08.2017 um 11:19 schrieb Pete French <petefrench at
ingresso.co.uk>:
>>> The HP micro servers work very well, and you can pick them up
remakably cheaply [...]
>>> Not sure about ECC memory support there though.
>> 
>> They do support ECC, no problem.
>> 
>> They are available with different CPU configurations from
>> as Pete said remarkably cheap Celeron D based systems
>> up to Xeon CPUs.
> 
> I've just sold my Microserver Gen8 (Xeon) just recently.
> It's a beautiful little machine, but I didn't make me happy in the
long run.
> 
> Reasons:
> - Limited to 8GB Ram in total
> - Only 4 HDDs
> - JBOD support is not great
> - Harddrives are never going to sleep (not supported)
> 
> Installing FreeBSD was harder than expected. The machine refused to boot
FreeBSD
> from the internal non-raid SATA ports. I didn't try FreeNAS though.
smbios.system.product="ProLiant MicroServer Gen8"
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220L V2 @ 2.30GHz (2294.80-MHz K8-class CPU)

16 GB RAM, FreeBSD installation was no problem at all.

What do you mean by "JBOD support"? Disable RAID in the systems BIOS
setup, put ZFS on AHCI drives ...

ahci0: <Intel Cougar Point AHCI SATA controller> port
0x10c0-0x10c7,0x10c8-0x10cb,0x10d0-0x10d7,0x10d8-0x10db,0x10e0-0x10ff mem
0xfacd0000-0xfacd07ff irq 17 at device 31.2 on pci0
ahci0: [ITHREAD]
ahci0: AHCI v1.30 with 6 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
ahcich0: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci0
ahcich0: [ITHREAD]
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <WDC WD2000FYYZ-01UL1B0 01.01K01> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
ada0: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)

This is our office file, print and mail server. No FreeNAS this time,
just plain FreeBSD.

Patrick
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Hi Patrick,

* Patrick M. Hausen wrote:
>smbios.system.product="ProLiant MicroServer Gen8"
>CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220L V2 @ 2.30GHz (2294.80-MHz K8-class CPU)
>
>16 GB RAM, FreeBSD installation was no problem at all.
You got me. I just double checked. 16GB is the limit. You're right.
>What do you mean by "JBOD support"? Disable RAID in the systems
BIOS
>setup, put ZFS on AHCI drives ...
Activating JBOD deactivates the B120i raid controller. Unfortnately the 
temperature sensor is somehow controlled by the raid controller. So enabling 
JBOD technically works, but the machine is a lot louder than with enabled
raid. As a workaround I've built 4 raid arrays with one disk each.

It works, but it doesn't feel right to me.

It's my home file server sitting basically next to my monitor. In an office 
environment, you probably don't care about the noise so much.

See: 
https://community.hpe.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563

Best Regards,
Stefan