Hello, I'm excited to build my first freeNAS system

[Pmeister]

Hello,

I just joined this community, but I have been reading quite a bit around. My main concern right now is developing a dependable solution to backup all the stuff we have around the house, mainly 3 MacBooks and 3 Windows PC's. After trying several USB drives which worked for a few months only, I'm close to pulling the trigger on a freeNAS full fledged solution. I'm thinking that the brains of the machine will be based on the Supermicro X11SSH-F-O motherboard paired to an Intel Xeon E3-1220 or E3-1230 v5 Skylake. Two (or four!) sticks of Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CPB should round things up nicely. The M.2 port should allow me to add an SSD disc. A bunch of WD Reds (4 GB each) will provide all the storage I need, although I'm puzzled by the recommendation on the Supermicro site to get WD Gold drives (for instance, WD4002FYYZ)...

About me. I have built 4 or 5 PC's in the past and I love hacking around with Linux. I don't mind Windows, but given the choice I'd say give me macOS any day over Windows (there is a Unix core under the covers!)

 

[anodos]

The M.2 port should allow me to add an SSD disc.

This may or may not be useful. Some people use a single-ssd pool to provide 'scratch space' for torrents to avoid free-space fragmentation in their main zpool. I think most people drool over certain Intel PCIe SSDs for L2ARC and SLOG devices.

A bunch of WD Reds (4 GB each) will provide all the storage I need, although I'm puzzled by the recommendation on the Supermicro site to get WD Gold drives (for instance, WD4002FYYZ)...

This is due to what WD recommends for servers this size. You don't want to go against vendor's advice. At least officially. For home use, WD Reds are fine.

About me. I have built 4 or 5 PC's in the past and I love hacking around with Linux. I don't mind Windows, but given the choice I'd say give me macOS any day over Windows (there is a Unix core under the covers!)

Powershell has made the windows world much nicer than it used to be. Windows even has an SMB client that actually works properly (unlike macs). With their in-house SMB client, apple has managed to develop a proprietary SMB client / server that is worse than the open source version. I'm rather impressed.