I'm reasonably new to FreeNAS but I've used network attached storage at home here for years. My current production NAS is a Netgear unit with two one terabyte drives in a mirror configuration. Cheap, easy and has no real safety for data. I've recently added a FreeNAS system that I'm moving all my data to.
The FreeNAS build is basically built on Dell server parts. The server is a Dell 1950 III with two quad-core Xeon cpus running at 3GHZ. There are two power supplies, sixteen GB of ECC ram and a Perc raid controller that runs four 1TB drives. These drives were used (each as raid-0) for checking out FreeNAS. They have been retired after successful testing since you can't really run a raid controller with FreeNAS.
The current active disk controller is an LSI Logic SAS9200-8E. This connects to a Dell MD1000 SAS/SATA storage unit that takes up to 15 drives via a pair of SAS interfaces. There are two power supplies in this unit and I can daisy-chain another unit onto the first one to support an additional fifteen drives. In the current implementation, I'm running seven drives with four as data and three as parity (ZFS). Both of these units are powered from an APC RM3000XL UPS that's connected to the server unit with a serial cable. I tested the UPS connection and software by unplugging the UPS - just to be sure it would shut down cleanly. It did work correctly. Every drive was also run through the SMART tests - which took two days to complete. A single failure occurred which was determined to be a defective SATA to SAS interposer. This was replaced and all drives passed the tests.
I plan on bumping up the ram to 32GB in the near future. I'm running the Plex plugin and want to have plenty of memory. Additional memory is possible (up to 64GB) but is not cost effective at $750-1000 versus about $150 for going to 32GB. All of the equipment (server, disk array and UPS) are mounted in a rack.
The FreeNAS build is basically built on Dell server parts. The server is a Dell 1950 III with two quad-core Xeon cpus running at 3GHZ. There are two power supplies, sixteen GB of ECC ram and a Perc raid controller that runs four 1TB drives. These drives were used (each as raid-0) for checking out FreeNAS. They have been retired after successful testing since you can't really run a raid controller with FreeNAS.
The current active disk controller is an LSI Logic SAS9200-8E. This connects to a Dell MD1000 SAS/SATA storage unit that takes up to 15 drives via a pair of SAS interfaces. There are two power supplies in this unit and I can daisy-chain another unit onto the first one to support an additional fifteen drives. In the current implementation, I'm running seven drives with four as data and three as parity (ZFS). Both of these units are powered from an APC RM3000XL UPS that's connected to the server unit with a serial cable. I tested the UPS connection and software by unplugging the UPS - just to be sure it would shut down cleanly. It did work correctly. Every drive was also run through the SMART tests - which took two days to complete. A single failure occurred which was determined to be a defective SATA to SAS interposer. This was replaced and all drives passed the tests.
I plan on bumping up the ram to 32GB in the near future. I'm running the Plex plugin and want to have plenty of memory. Additional memory is possible (up to 64GB) but is not cost effective at $750-1000 versus about $150 for going to 32GB. All of the equipment (server, disk array and UPS) are mounted in a rack.
