Help with backup and upgrade - FreeNAS/Plex

[Happyevil]

So I've been lurking a bit and found a few applicable posts but nothing that quite answered my particular question.

For starters, I'm currently running a 6x2tb RaidZ2 FreeNAS setup off of an e350 APU with 8gb of RAM. It works great. I was linking it to a separate computer (a Mac Mini) for my Plex server. However, my Mac Mini has failed me so rather than buy a new second server I'd prefer to run it all off of the same machine to save power, money and space.

I'd like to reuse my PSU which is 450w and should obviously be no issue. I plan to get 16gb of RAM already. Even though I haven't seen any performance failures I figure why not.

So here are my 2 question:

1: What CPU is recommended for a FreeNAS/Plex combo?

I know FreeNAS doesn't use much CPU but likes lots of RAM. Plex on the other hand likes lots of CPU and doesn't need as much RAM. Either way 16gb seems like it will be enough but I've had trouble choosing a CPU. I was thinking of a low power i3 or i5 until I noticed a lot of other people choosing socket 1150 Xenon CPUs. So I wanted to see if that was actually recommended.

My only restriction to hardware is that it must be miniITX compatible.

2: How to best make sure everything moves over safely?

Before you ask, yes, I have backups of my drives but I'd prefer not to spend the many, many hours it will take to transfer back and forth if I don't have to. I'm somewhat unclear on how to properly upgrade hardware and ensure that my data/pools stay in tact. I'm not so worried about setting up other settings. If possible I'd also like to upgrade the version of FreeNAS I'm running and I'm not sure if that adds to the complication.

I'm currently booting off USB on FreeNAS v8.2-RELEASE-p6.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

 

[DrKK]

Sir:

Plex uses almost no CPU whatsoever, unless you are using it for video transcoding.

Make a build that you think is reasonable, link to it, and ***PROVIDED IT IS CLEAR FROM THE BUILD THAT YOU HAVE READ THE FORUMS AND UNDERSTAND BASIC FREENAS REQUIREMENTS***, one of the guys on here will be happy to critique what you're planning to buy. But they don't really make individual recommendations as it is impossible to understand the extent of every user's use case and knowledge.

 

[Happyevil]

Plex uses almost no CPU whatsoever, unless you are using it for video transcoding.

Make a build that you think is reasonable, link to it, and ***PROVIDED IT IS CLEAR FROM THE BUILD THAT YOU HAVE READ THE FORUMS AND UNDERSTAND BASIC FREENAS REQUIREMENTS***,

I apologize, I should have mentioned that I will be using it for transcoding. Otherwise I am aware that it requires very little CPU. I've been using FreeNAS for 3 years now (started on v7.x) so I'm familiar with the requirements (yes I've read the Wiki too) and was simply asking because I had seen the Xenon appear a lot and wasn't sure if it offered an advantage I may not have been aware of. Otherwise it felt like the low power usage i3 4130T would be fine or at most an i5 4430. I didn't think it required a full build out to ask this question...

Do you have any comment on my second question? I'm not sure if there's a guide out there somewhere that I missed but I. I just haven't had to do a move like this one yet. The last time I adjusted anything I switched to a larger server and just transferred between the two.

 

[cyberjock]

I won't talk about CPU usage.. I've discussed that at least 20 times lately and we have stickies on the topic.

As for moving data I personally found that mounting SMB shares from one server to the other and doing a copy using the local CLI to be very fast and simple. I have moved many TBs of data for others using this router and it is generally VERY fast. I created a thread on how to do this somewhere on the forums back in Dec2012 or Jan 2013.