First time build

[Eddieinoz]

Hello All
This is my first post so please be gentle

I plan on building my first NAS for the Family Home consisting of
2 Desktops
1 Laptop
2 Tablets
5 Smartphones
The idea is that the NAS will automatically backup everything. (I beleive this can easily be done with FreeNAS)
Main priority is on secure data storage of all the family photos, E-mails and Financial data with file sharing ability of photos and school project data etc for the kids
At this stage I do not plan on any VM or Transcoding work as the desktops is where this will happen if needed.

These are the planned parts, board with embedded cpu, RAM and HDD I was planning on using for the project
The rest of the components I Ready have
Just wondering if you could confirm or reject my choices
Supermicro A2SDI-4C-HLN4F (BGA 1310, Mini ITX)
Kingston 8GB DDR3 2133MHz Reg ECC Module (1x, 8GB, DDR4-2133, DIMM 288)
4 x WD Red (4TB, 3.5")

Appreciate any feedback or comments the experienced community may want to pass on.
Cheers

 

[Eddieinoz]

Sorry all

I just realized that the Ram is a no go
I cant seem to find anything here in Europe anyone got some suggestions about compatible ram for the abouve MoBo CPU combo?

Appreciate any help with stores that ship to Switzerland

Cheers

 

[Heracles]

Hi Eddie,

Your main goal being security, here a a few points for you :
--Do not use RaidZ1 ; go for RaidZ2
Whenever a RaidZ1 looses a drive, it drops to no protection at all. Also, during the rebuild, the RaidZ1 will not recover from a single bad sector because there is no more redundancy.
With RaidZ2, not only the structure can loose a second drive, but if there is an error reading a small part of the data, the parity is still there to recover and re-silver properly.

--Snapshots are essentials, but are not a real backup
Take regular snapshots of your data, but do not consider them as full backups. Design your snapshot schedule so you do not store more than 1000 snapshots. Not that FreeNAS is unable to create more, but because when you have too many, it is a nightmare to browser them, look for what you need, delete / clone the right one, etc.

--Think about physical incidents
You can have all the redundancy and backups you want, if they are all in your house, a single incident like fire can destroy everything. Be sure to keep at least one copy of your data in a separate location.

--The rule for 3 copies
Always have at least 3 copies of your data (and again, snapshots are not a copy).
Here, my 3 copies are :
---Users have their main instance of their data in their systems (computers, tablets, etc). (1st copy)
First copy is always without protection, by definition
---That copy is synced with the main server using Nextcloud (second copie) which have undeleted, versioning and snapshots
Second copy here. Snapshots, Versioning and undelete will recover from a problem on the client (ransomware, delete, broken device, ...).
---Main server does ZFS replication to a DR FreeNAS located about 450 Km away
No physical incident can affect both servers at once. The logical protection in front of the NAS also make it very difficult for a logical incident to reach and damage the snapshots. One element of that protection is that no one reach the FreeNAS server directly and the Nextcloud frontend server can not access the snapshots or the OS side of the FreeNAS server.

Hope that will help you design a system that will be safe enough for your precious data,

 

[Chris Moore]

Some very good information to help get you started:

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

Why not to use RAID-5 or RAIDz1
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev. 1e) 2017-05-06
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

Hardware Recommendations by @cyberjock - from 26 Aug 2014 - and still valid
https://forums.freenas.org/threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/