BUILD Cheapest way to build a FREENAS?

[di0de]

At $277 that is an attractive price. I wonder if the Pentium is worth saving the extra $77 over the i3, any thoughts? On page 1 somebody mentioned the pentium is good for light file sharing and 1 encoding stream (Plex). My usage would probably be 3-4 streams (subsonic, plex, kodi), plus other plugins (i.e. virtualization as mentioned by Robert Trevellyan above).

 

[rsquared]

The number of streams you can handle depends on whether you need to transcode or not. If you're using Kodi (file shares over smb/nfs with no transcoding) the network is more likely to be your bottleneck than the processor. The same is true of plex if your files are in a format that doesn't need any transcoding.

 

[bmcclure937]

Look at my signature line. Lenovo TS140 and additional 8GB of ECC memory was my budget build.

Is this still a good recommendation for a cheap option out of the box to run FreeNAS? I am in the market right now and debating QNAP 451+ or a FreeNAS build. My current FreeNAS build is 6+ years old running v 0.7 something...

 

[Ericloewe]

Is this still a good recommendation for a cheap option out of the box to run FreeNAS? I am in the market right now and debating QNAP 451+ or a FreeNAS build. My current FreeNAS build is 6+ years old running v 0.7 something...

Sure, if you can find them.

 

[bmcclure937]

Sure, if you can find them.

What do you mean? I can find Lenovo TS 140 all over the place for reasonable prices. Would upgrade to 16GB ECC RAM right off the bat and install WD Red drives for storage. Seems like a cheap and easy option to get rolling.

Is there a better alternative available now? I am planning to create a thread to help answer some of my questions.

 

[Ericloewe]

What do you mean?

Just that I'm not aware of the specifics of their availability.

Is there a better alternative available now?

I think they're probably the cheapest option we'd reasonably consider.

 

[bmcclure937]

I think they're probably the cheapest option we'd reasonably consider.

Thanks for your help. I am looking into the specifics to see if this is the route I will take.

My current NAS boots from USB flash drive but it looks like that is no longer recommended...

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks for your help. I am looking into the specifics to see if this is the route I will take.

My current NAS boots from USB flash drive but it looks like that is no longer recommended...

Works fine. It can be slow, but it works and is not a major headache. I estimate that most people here still use flash drives and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

 

[bmcclure937]

Works fine. It can be slow, but it works and is not a major headache. I estimate that most people here still use flash drives and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Once again, thanks. I feel overwhelmed with all the new info but it is time to upgrade!

Are folks using a single USB drive for boot media or are people using 2 (mirrored) now that the boot media in 9.3 is ZFS?

 

[Ericloewe]

Once again, thanks. I feel overwhelmed with all the new info but it is time to upgrade!

Are folks using a single USB drive for boot media or are people using 2 (mirrored) now that the boot media in 9.3 is ZFS?

There's a bit of both. Doesn't hurt to mirror them, really.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Doesn't hurt to mirror them use a SSD, really.

Fix'd :D

 

[alexg]

My TS140 is still running great with plex and crashplan, but I decided to stick with 9.2.1.7 version. Had to replace usb flash boot drive once. Make your config backups and it is easy to replace it. I used up all SATA ports for data disks.