I'm doing research for my first freenas server. Something ~20TB. (watched vids, read docs)
And since I want Plex support, the Ryzen 1600 with its 65W TDP and 6 cores / 12 threads looked great for transcoding. Should even transcode 4k according to passmarks.
The problem: Freenas is FreeBSD / unix. Apparently there's issues with AMD support. Also in general Mobo + ECC RAM + Ryzen seems to be hard to figure out. @wendell Do you reckon ryzen + freenas is a thing? Or what hw alternatives should I go for for the same value/$? Or maybe Ryzen + UnRAID?
PS: I heard plex can be slow on freenas. Does it need an SSD jail?
A list (e.g. in form of a forum post) of all the Ryzen motherboards tested by @wendell that support ECC would be great. But from my memory, the Taichi board he used in one of his first videos on Ryzen, seems to support ECC, so that should work with FreeNAS too, I guess.
Since that post is already 3 months old, I think the risk is not that big anymore (edit: however, the bug seems to be not fixed yet) and if they managed to get it to work back then, you shouldn't have any issues now. If you can live with the impact of the bug (which seems to be not too bad) you can still run it and patch later. If I had a Ryzen system, I would test it, but unfortunately I don't (yet).
Maybe @wendell can give it a quick test and report his results here or maybe even in a video?
Yes. Would love at least @wendell 2 cents. Or anyone else that has a Ryzen already.
Yes, but we don't know for sure what's the maximum amount of ECC it supports. As you upgrade your ZFS storage for your NAS, you'll need a lot more RAM. I think he tested 16GB only. Or was it 24gb? Still 24gb ram means ~ 24TB of ZFS storage if you want deduplication. (which is probably fine for me but others want 32gb or 64gb of ram )
I haven't work with that much ECC RAM before but I don't see a reason why the board shouldn't support ECC with the maximum of 64GB it officially supports (given that you can find 16GB ECC modules that are compatible). 8GB ECC modules are listed on Asrock's website, so you should definitely be able to get 32GB to work.
Old topic I know but it doesn’t seem like we come to a conclusion does Ryzen work with FreeNAS
I apologize if there is a really simple answer and i apologize for bringing this topic back up
I have been running Ryzen on FreeNas 11 without issue for about 2 months now.
I upgraded from an old dual core pentium. I first initiated the FreeNas update from 9.10 to 11.0, and then swapped out the MOBO/CPU/RAM with the ryzen stuff. Everything transitioned over fine, including all of my volumes/jails and I haven’t looked back. The system has already received a couple of patches also without a hitch. The only down time it has suffered was back when Irma knocked out the power earlier this month, but other than that it’s been %100 up-time. The 1600 makes a great NAS box especially when you are running a lot of jails, and a Plex server.
Are you using Plex? Did you test what’s the highest quality stream you can get out of the ryzen 5 1600? Like 30Mbps? Does it do 4K? H.265? How many streams can it handle at the same time and at what quality?
Did you ever encounter the need to have a GPU in that system or is it fine with 0 video hardware? What kind of ram do you use?
I’m asking about general performance of the 1600. So transcode -to- 30Mbps, can it do 2x 1080p + 1x phone, etc… I don’t demand any specific requirements, I wanna know ballpark.
For instance I have an old Intel Core 2 Quad that can’t transcode any kind of 4k without constant buffering. Can’t even do 4k -> 1080p without buffering. Tried with a 4K life of Pi movie sample/trailer. 4k->720p kinda worked, forgot the bitrate.
Unfortunately I have not tried running Plex on it yet, but that is next on my agenda for this box. I am willing to do some tests to get numbers on the transcode performance. However from what I know about the transcoding performance, it should be able to handle up to 5 concurrent 1080p streams.
The box is surprisingly low on power as ryzen is able to idle pretty low. I enabled the extra power saving options in the UEFI as well to help with this issue.
You wiill need to have a GPU to do the initial setup, but luckily my mobo allowed me to boot without having a GPU in there once I was sure everything was working properly. Now I just use the web GUI for all the configuration. I am not sure if this is the case with all mobos though so… (I am using an asus b350m-a motherboard).
In terms of RAM, I am actually using non-ecc memory (I know, I know). I am using a Corsair 32GB 2x16 kit running at DDR4 2666. It works fine with this board, and is double the amount of RAM I was using before.
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