Basic Budget FreeNAS upgrades and repurposing - seeking guidance/advice

[captain stupy]

I am looking for some best practice information - if not direct answers, links to solid best practice explainers would also be appreciated.

I have a budget setup that I'm looking to "retool" for more adventurous usage.

The setup is a:
HP Proliant ML10-v2 (i3-4150)
12 GB ECC RAM (8GB + 4GB)
4 x 2TV HGST HDDs (these were refurb enterprise units)
Sandisk Ultrafit USB flash drive - 32GB - boot drive
FreeNAS-11.3-U3.2

I know refurbished drives are not ideal, but these have been running solid with light duty for 4 years on top of their enterprise life, and the price was right.
I know that the USB flash drive as boot is out of favor but it is what it is - I'm considering getting another for ~$8 to at least mirror it.

I have been using this build for light duty as a basic NAS just for network share directories. However I am totally repurposing it and looking to add a bunch of plugins and/or jails/containers and VMs. In addition to shared directory access, Plex, a git server, music server, rss server app, irc, podcast server, and other 24/7 services that could benefit from centraliztion.

The ML10-v2 has a mini-SAS to 4 LFF drives + 2 more SATA connectors on the board. I plan on continuing to use the 4 2TB drives in RAIDZ1. I have two budget 256GB Intel 545s SSDs that I'm hoping to use for the plugins, jails/containers, and an on-demand (non-24/7) VM or two, if that's reasonable.

I have a cheap Rocket 620AP daul SATA III PCI-Express expansion card that I think I could eventually use eventually to replace the USB flash boot drive(s) with a cheap SSSD or two. There's only so much physical space for drives or spare Wattage in the PSU, so more expansion than that isn't likely.

I am considering expanding the RAM with some reasonably priced kingston ECC DIMMs, either adding another 8GB+4GB or 2x8GB.

I've seen Intel Xeon E3-1220-v3 and E3 -1226-v3 cpus for about $25-$30 on ebay, but I'm not sure the real world gains are worth pushing the cpu TDP up to 80/84 Watts as it idles nice and cool at about 40-45 Watts right now. Any of the 1265L-v3 through 1286L-v3 cpus that have TDPs of 65 Watts or under cost more and are more rare for sale.

If I get things working smoothly, I'll look into swapping out the refurbed 2TB drives for Shucked 10TB WD drives I've started acquiring.

The demands on this server will be pretty light. I think PLEX will at most ever be tasked with 2 x 1080p streams (likely from 1080p content, but still mostly just one stream), and there aren't really more than one, maybe two simultaneous users for any of the other services. Typical use will be really only hit one service at a time though.

I haven't spent much money on this thing and I'm hoping to avoid spending much more, but I'd like to experiment and see what I can setup while also getting some real utility out of it.

I'd like to know if I'm on an obvious wrong track on any of these possibilities, what upgrades would result in the best experience improvements (bang-for-buck) and if there are some good best guides for considering these changes.

Thanks

 

[Yorick]

I know that the USB flash drive as boot is out of favor but it is what it is

Only because of reliability. You can always build yourself "premium" flash sticks thusly:

- Any M.2 SATA 2242 for example https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-MTS400S-Solid-State-TS32GMTS400S/dp/B077H276GQ/
- Any M.2 SATA to USB for example https://www.amazon.com/Aluminium-Enclosure-NG-2242A-Extension-Converter/dp/B082CJ2V76/

That's a better idea than that Rocket SATA contraption.

RAM expansion sounds like a plan.

TDP is not idle usage, and, yes, it doesn't sound like you'll be doing anything compute-intensive. If you run up against CPU limits, tackle it then.

> I'll look into swapping out the refurbed 2TB drives for Shucked 10TB WD drives I've started acquiring.

Aye. That's where you'll start getting into some danger with raidz1, resilvering times will increase to where you may have a second failure, if you go for 10TB drives.
SSDs are not needed for your jails and VMs, you haven't described anything IO-intensive as far as I can tell. Therefore, you might consider going for a 6-wide raidz2 instead. If you do stick with the raidz1, just be aware it has a higher risk of failure, and be prepared to recover from that.

 

[captain stupy]

Thanks.

Ahh yes, I recently read about the resilvering time issue with very large drives.

TDP is not idle usage...

I know, but the ML10v2's PSU is meager and I don't want to tax it... but you're suggesting it's likely low priority anyway, so no matter.

Only because of reliability. You can always build yourself "premium" flash sticks...

Is there any reason I shouldn't assume any external USB SSD drive would be just as effective as the M.2 setup? since I already have a few 2.5" SSDs and 2.5" USB enclosures, it just seems easier.

SSDs are not needed for your jails and VMs, you haven't described anything IO-intensive as far as I can tell.

I didn't make an exaustive list of applications I'd like to experiment with - could you offer a few that you think would be intensive enough to warrant a separate SSD pool for jails and VMs? I'll probably give the SSD pool a shot anyway since I have them and if I buy a couple of matching 2TB drives and switch to raidz2, I'm really just getting 2 extra TB of usable space and I'd have to tear down the pool to switch to raidz. I'd probably think about adding one drive to the pool and one as a hot spare before tearing down the raidz to build a raidz2.

Thanks for your feedback.