tpmeredith
Cadet
- Joined
- May 23, 2014
- Messages
- 6
I saw the more recent build recommendations for a home build and commented on it (here), but wanted to make a writeup with benchmark speeds once it's completed.
I've built a few freenas builds at my store for our storage needs and have been itching to have more storage at home. I've been on a mission to build an extremely affordable reliable home freenas build not meant for a production environment. I do not want to cut corners and want to follow all best practices such as ECC memory / etc.
Motherboard: $80 shipped: Foxconn Dual LGA 1366 Motherboard with 18 Ram Slots (9 per socket).. Taking a little bit of a gamble with this board because the apparent lack of documentation but have plenty of other boards laying around if it doesn't work out and can find another use for it otherwise. I saved several supermicro boards but went with this one based on price. It appears to have IPMI but I'll comment back more when I know more. I could have likely sent the guy a $70 offer but I didn't want to waste my time.
CPU: $19 Shipped: Intel Xeon L5630 - This is one of the lowest 1366 wattage chips available at 40w - you can save ~2-5 watts by not getting a quad core and likely wouldn't have a perfomance difference but I felt the extra 2w was worth having a QC - I'm only using one of the CPU sockets for power but like having the option down the road to drop a second one in to use the additional ram slots if the need arose. At less than $20 per chip this is also great. It's not the lowest power chip by any means offered today, but the average person can likely stomach adding the slight extra power for the initial cost savings.
Case: I've got a lot of cases floating around my shop but if I had to buy one for this purpose would be a cheap case as mentioned above - I've seen several floating around ebay or locally for as little as ~$40-50.0. Once I settle on which case and PSU I'm using I'll comment back on the build log.
Ram: $90 Shipped: Hynix 6x4gb DDR3 ECC 1333Mhz - Allows for 24gb and 3 open slots without using the second CPU to easily upgrade to 36gb down the road - Could even do more with 8gb sticks but this is a lot cheaper with 4gb sticks. If I was using less storage I could likely even get by with 12gb to drop the cost even more.
Hard Drives :- 6 x Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 5900RPM Drives. These would not typically be my first or even second choice of hard drives and wouldn't sell them to a client, but I'm using them simply because I had 5 of them in my shop that were barely used with less than <400 hours each on them, so I bought two more and will have a Raid-Z2. If I ever have an inkling of problems with them I'll likely get some WD Red's or SE/RE Drives.
I will probably end up getting an IBM M1015 with JBOD to feel better than using the onboard storage, but not convinced I really need it in this scenario.
All in all without the storage card with these parts you could likely throw together a build for ~$250 in hardware and have a ton of room for expansion in RAM. This isn't the most power efficient build in the world but for the low cost is very appealing for a SOHO/home environment.
I've built a few freenas builds at my store for our storage needs and have been itching to have more storage at home. I've been on a mission to build an extremely affordable reliable home freenas build not meant for a production environment. I do not want to cut corners and want to follow all best practices such as ECC memory / etc.
Motherboard: $80 shipped: Foxconn Dual LGA 1366 Motherboard with 18 Ram Slots (9 per socket).. Taking a little bit of a gamble with this board because the apparent lack of documentation but have plenty of other boards laying around if it doesn't work out and can find another use for it otherwise. I saved several supermicro boards but went with this one based on price. It appears to have IPMI but I'll comment back more when I know more. I could have likely sent the guy a $70 offer but I didn't want to waste my time.
CPU: $19 Shipped: Intel Xeon L5630 - This is one of the lowest 1366 wattage chips available at 40w - you can save ~2-5 watts by not getting a quad core and likely wouldn't have a perfomance difference but I felt the extra 2w was worth having a QC - I'm only using one of the CPU sockets for power but like having the option down the road to drop a second one in to use the additional ram slots if the need arose. At less than $20 per chip this is also great. It's not the lowest power chip by any means offered today, but the average person can likely stomach adding the slight extra power for the initial cost savings.
Case: I've got a lot of cases floating around my shop but if I had to buy one for this purpose would be a cheap case as mentioned above - I've seen several floating around ebay or locally for as little as ~$40-50.0. Once I settle on which case and PSU I'm using I'll comment back on the build log.
Ram: $90 Shipped: Hynix 6x4gb DDR3 ECC 1333Mhz - Allows for 24gb and 3 open slots without using the second CPU to easily upgrade to 36gb down the road - Could even do more with 8gb sticks but this is a lot cheaper with 4gb sticks. If I was using less storage I could likely even get by with 12gb to drop the cost even more.
Hard Drives :- 6 x Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 5900RPM Drives. These would not typically be my first or even second choice of hard drives and wouldn't sell them to a client, but I'm using them simply because I had 5 of them in my shop that were barely used with less than <400 hours each on them, so I bought two more and will have a Raid-Z2. If I ever have an inkling of problems with them I'll likely get some WD Red's or SE/RE Drives.
I will probably end up getting an IBM M1015 with JBOD to feel better than using the onboard storage, but not convinced I really need it in this scenario.
All in all without the storage card with these parts you could likely throw together a build for ~$250 in hardware and have a ton of room for expansion in RAM. This isn't the most power efficient build in the world but for the low cost is very appealing for a SOHO/home environment.
