Crazy Macer Life

the hardware.

currently the proxmox server is a ryzen 3700x on an asrock x570d4u motherboard. as i said earlier: say what you want about asrock but the x570d4u hit all the check boxes when making a cheaper server that supported ecc.

i am going to install freebsd on an ancient supermicro 1u running dual xeon X5660 cpus. i would like to eventually come off this as well and use something a little more efficient but this is what i have and is more than capable (even today) at running the jails and vms i need to run.

on the nas / storage side i have an ancient isilon running dual xeon X5660 cpus. i had to make some modifications to it in order to get it to not sound like a jet engine (like adding cpu fans and removing the system fans that connect directly to molex power and cannot be throttled. i’ve run it for years with around 30 platters in it flawlessly using vanilla freebsd. my needs are rather simple: smb/samba and nfs. i’m sure other things like iscsi aren’t like going into the coal mine as well but i haven’t had a need.

i would like to eventually mothball the isilon since it is so power hungry and put giant platters in the (current) proxmox server, install fbsd on it, start off with a 3 disk raidz2 vdev (x 20TB) with platters then raidz expand it once freebsd 15 is released which should come with openzfs 2.3 which has the raidz expansion. i will then slowly expand it to 12 x 20TB platters over time since this is just for bulk storage and speed isn’t a priority but redundancy would be nice to have.