Mac Pro 24Bay Server i7 4790K, 32Gb Ram, 56TB Raid 6 HDD, 770GTX 4G

[Panamamax]

Panamamax's Mac Pro 24Bay Server:
GA-Z87X-UD7 TH - i7-4790K - 32GB RAM - GTX 770 4G - 56TB Raid 6 HDD,​

Components

Intel Core i7-4790K Processor (BX80646I74790K)

Corsair Hydro Series H110

GA-Z87X-UD7 TH Motherboard

Kingston HyperX Beast 32 GB Kit (4x8 GB) 2400MHz DDR3 PC3-19200 Non-ECC CL11 DIMM XMP Desktop Memory KHX24C11T3K4/32X

Gigabyte GTX 770 GDDR5-4GB 2xDVI/HDMI/DP OC WINDFORCE 3X Graphics Card GV-N770OC-4GD

Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB (OS Only)

2 of Crucial M550 1TB SATA 2.5" 7mm (Software Raid 0 as Scratch Drive)

GMYLE (R) Micro USB Bluetooth 4.0 Dongle

Areca 1882-24 Raid Card with 4GB of Ram

16x Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB HDD

EVGA SuperNOVA 1000G2 1000W Power Supply

ASUS PB287Q 28-Inch Screen LED-Lit 4K Monitor


Comments

Good day everybody,

today i want to introduce you to my Hackintosh Server, i build more then one year ago.

my daily driver is a 15" Retina Mac Book Pro that i used as my only Mac together with a Drobo 5D before i moved to build my own Hackintosh. The main reason to build my own Mac was that i was not satisfied with the available solutions for larger data storage. they were either terrible expensive or slow.

I use my Mac mainly to work on Raw Photos and Raw Videos that I shoot with my 5D Mark 3 and the Magic lantern ad-on. Especially the RAW videos eat storage with about 100MB/s for the Footage and therefore you will run easy out of storage with common systems. Further more, I don't like to delete the original files from the camera so I basically store everything double, making it 200MB/s for the videos i shoot. The software, which I use for my photos, is Adobe Lightroom, and for my Videos I use Davinci Resolve from Black Magic Design.

I started my Hackintosh build with a cheap Raid 5 card and 8x4TB hard drives, but somehow I was not satisfied with the results of the speed with the cheap raid card. I also was not 100% happy with the risk I was taking with Raid 5, especially in a self made Hackintosh Solution.

Half year ago, I bought a old 24 Bay Supermicro Server Chassis from eBay for 200$, ripped everything out of it except the backplane and the drive bays, and also bought a Areca 1882 24Bay Controller with 4GB of ECC Ram. I set up a 16x4Tb Raid 6 Array and was able to move everything into the old Server Case that i modified where ever it was needed to fit my stuff ( Water cooler for the CPU, normal Power Supply, etc...)

From the beginning, I considered a Hackintosh could never be a solution for a professional application and to give my most value I have, my data, in the hands of a self-made solution. Even I continuously back up my data to a FreeNAS system and off site to 8TB external hard drives, I was surprises how flawless and trouble free my Build is working by just following the Guides and recommendations here in the Forum. Since then, I never lost any file, and basically have not more trouble then I have with my original MPB.

Just last week, I updated everything from 10.9.4 to 10.10.4 with a fresh installation from ground up, and again within 3 hours everything was running smooth again.

I hope I could inspire some of you to may consider internal storage solutions like the mine over external expensive solutions.

If you have any questions, iIwould be pleased to answer them!
A big Thanks to everybody making self made Mac´s Possible!

...Max

 

[yoji]

How did you manage to connect 16 x 4TB HDDs plus 3 x SSD, with only 10 onboard SATA ports?

Nice storage plus server.

 

[Panamamax]

i didn´t...

i have all 24 Drive bays connected to a Areca 1882-24 Raid Card. i only use my 4 SSD´s directly connected to the Motherboards SATA Ports.

Here is some more information to the Card. OS X Drivers are available for 10.10 from the website, once they are installed, the card just works fine.


http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1882.htm

 

[rwillett]

This looks very professional. Well done.

Whats the connection between the Mac and the Server? AFP? NFS? SMB? Direct connection?

I was surprised that your write speeds were twice your read speeds. Normally reading is faster then writing unless you can cache a lot of the write data and do lazy writes.

Did you consider FreeNAS as the main storage system? I looked at it but my server needs are mainly small NFS files and it seemed overkill for what I wanted. The system requiremeets are just about what FreeNAS needs though the FreeNAS people seem to like 128GB of RAM, 10x 8TB disks, high end SuperMicro boards and stuff like that.

Great stuff though.

Rob

 

[Panamamax]

Thanks Rob,

The "real" read and write speeds is about 1,6 Gb/s witch reflects 100Mb/s per drive in the raid array. i post one screenshot from a aja test were i tested with 16Gb files. if i test with lower or with the BMD disk tester the results are "unreal" since i have 4Gb of DDR2 Ram that eats the write away as fast as my PCIe slot can transfer the data.

For me i did not consider any external Storage solution since i would have again the bottle neck of in my case gigabit ethernet. maybe with 10Gbit becoming a standard you could consider storing everything external. But from a birdwatching sunday afternoon i come back with 150Gb - 200Gb of RAW video files and i don't want to wait hours to handle the data again.

Also were i live electricity is crazy expensive (28 Cents/KWh) so you think about what you keep running and what not.

In my case the mac pro uses between 330Watt and 550Watt with all discs spinning.

For the FreeNAS i bought another Old Supermicro 3U - 16 Bay chassis on eBay for about 200$.
I was planing to install one of those intel atom all in one server boards, however, once the server arrived it was fully equipped with a old dual CPU SUpermicro server board (only one CPU installed) and only little ram installed.

I tested FreeNAS on that hardware that it came with and the CPU power was more then enough on the old 4 core xeon it came with. I then bought 64GB of ECC DDR2 Ram on eBay for 80$ and placed my old 3TB HDD´s i collected over the years in the FreeNAS. The NAS Server has its terrible noisy original Power supply installed and Takes about another 300-400Watts while on operation, so i only use it to backup over night once in a while and then leave it off again. Anyway i saved a lot of money for the free old but useful hardware i got, so i can spend that over time on my electricity bill

i connected it via AFP server and i can read write with about 60-80Mb/s over gigabit ethernet.
I just copy my most important files to the FreeNAS via CCC, The full clone i am doing to 8TB external Seagate drives, stored in my company safe away from home.


If anybody is thinking of doing the same in an old Server case, i would recommend to use 4U cases since in those you can fit a standard power supply like i did, that won't sound like a starting Jet

Just look arround on Ebay, there is a ton of companies recycling 5-6 year old servers from data centers and give away all kind of stuff for cheap. below link may is a good starting point

http://www.ebay.com/itm/4U-Supermic...885?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item23552a7f8d

 

[rwillett]

Thanks Rob,

The "real" read and write speeds is about 1,6 Gb/s witch reflects 100Mb/s per drive in the raid array. i post one screenshot from a aja test were i tested with 16Gb files. if i test with lower or with the BMD disk tester the results are "unreal" since i have 4Gb of DDR2 Ram that eats the write away as fast as my PCIe slot can transfer the data.

Ah!, that makes sense. I did some testing with a non-ecc 8GB FreeNAS server to see how it might perform. I just watched the RAM usage go up and up almost immediately, basically RAM became the disk. It was insanely fast

<snip>

In my case the mac pro uses between 330Watt and 550Watt with all discs spinning.

Mine uses something similar but thats probably due to dual 280X graphics cards and Battlefield 4

For the FreeNAS i bought another Old Supermicro 3U - 16 Bay chassis on eBay for about 200$.
I was planing to install one of those intel atom all in one server boards, however, once the server arrived it was fully equipped with a old dual CPU SUpermicro server board (only one CPU installed) and only little ram installed.

I tested FreeNAS on that hardware that it came with and the CPU power was more then enough on the old 4 core xeon it came with. I then bought 64GB of ECC DDR2 Ram on eBay for 80$ and placed my old 3TB HDD´s i collected over the years in the FreeNAS. The NAS Server has its terrible noisy original Power supply installed and Takes about another 300-400Watts while on operation, so i only use it to backup over night once in a while and then leave it off again. Anyway i saved a lot of money for the free old but useful hardware i got, so i can spend that over time on my electricity bill

I never see these dammed deals with the SuperMicro kit. Its rare in the UK to boot. You got a great deal on the ECC memory. I've paid more than that for 4GB!

i connected it via AFP server and i can read write with about 60-80Mb/s over gigabit ethernet.
I just copy my most important files to the FreeNAS via CCC, The full clone i am doing to 8TB external Seagate drives, stored in my company safe away from home.

Do you mean 60MB or 60Mb/s. I would have thought you would get a lot more than 60Mb/sec.

If anybody is thinking of doing the same in an old Server case, i would recommend to use 4U cases since in those you can fit a standard power supply like i did, that won't sound like a starting Jet

Good advice.

Rob

 

[Panamamax]

Good day,

i think you mix up my Mac Pro and my FreeNAS...

those are 2 different systems.
The mac Pro has the Areca Raid controller that has 4GB of Ram.

The FreeNAS has 64GB of system RAM.

I get 60Megabyte per second between my Mac Pro and the NAS, what ever has the small or big B, i never can remember whats what

Inside the Mac Pro i get about 1,6 Gigabyte per second in the long run with files bigger 4gb.

...Max

 

[doggieshaman]

I would like to thank you for inspiring me to build a similar rig for my own resolve/4k work needs

 

[mariojuniorjp]

Nice build.

But, why you use a Smbios of MacPro 3,1? You have a Haswell processor, more specifically a i7 4790K. Use Smbios of iMac 15,1.

You have already set up the power management processor? I ask this because you own a machine with top hardware and how you make professional use of it, a good gerencimento energy is needed to take full advantage of the system.

 

[Panamamax]

well... thats actually a good point you mentioned...

Im quite good with hardware and stuff but software is not my very strong point, i can manage it but its not fun for me and i don't have the knowledge or patience for long failure finding etc... in this regards im more like a classic lazy apple user

I tried to install it with the mentioned system definition for the new imac that uses the same processor but if i remember right i got catched in some time outs and errors in -V mode and it never booted to the OS so i got back to the one that was working fine.

anyhow is there a huge differences between the system definitions?
What exactly do you mean with power management?

I was from the beginning thinking in building a X99 8Core/16threads beast with a Titan for resolve, since i never made any hacktinosh before and i build the machine at a time were X99 was just available a month or so i decided to go "small". so far i have only 1080P Raw Material from Magic Lantern and my 5Dmk3 and its working more or less ok in Resolve. Now with Resolve 12 even better then before. i still have the feeling im really at the min. configuration to have a realtime experience in Davinci but its working ok...

maybe the correct system def. and power management can improve something?

Would love to hear your advises!
...Max