In A Quandary On What Hardware To Buy

[expediter]

I am looking to build or buy a freenas system and I am trying to decide on the hardware. The problem I am having is that most of the guides that I have found are using older outdated hardware and larger quantity ecc ddr3 seems to to be hard to find at a reasonable price. I would also like it to be power efficient.

The usage will be in a church backing up video and audio files. Currently we have about 6.5 TB stored on a drobo and about 1.5 TB being added yearly. We are looking at switching to a higher quality video and will need much more storage than we currently have. I am thinking about 8x 4 TB drives with a 2 drive redundancy but thinking of possibly going larger.

I would like to keep costs down and I am trying to get a rough estimate on total cost buying vs building. I was looking at a asrock rack mini C2550D4I. The problem I am having is if we go with larger drives we will need more ram and I was not able to find any 16 GB ram sticks. I was also considering a used server on ebay or possibly a freenas mini xl.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

 

[Chris Moore]

You might want to review this thread before you decide to buy that board. They have been failing a lot..
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/please-help.46766/page-2#post-321255

Have you checked the guide we have here?

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

 

[danb35]

In addition to the hardware guide (which is highly recommended), you could look at a pre-built server. The Proliant ML10, for example, isn't the deal it once was (it was previously under $200 with an i3), but even at its current configuration/price it's a good choice--just add an 8 GB stick of RAM, a boot device, and your storage drives, and you'll be good to go. The Dell PowerEdge T30 is another inexpensive choice (starts at $179 with 4 GB of RAM and a G4400, includes a 1 TB hard drive that you wouldn't want to use for FreeNAS but could use elsewhere)--again, add an 8 GB stick of RAM, a boot device, and your storage drives. The T30 limits you to 4 storage drives, though; I'm not sure if it would be practical to increase that (though I'd bet the motherboard has at least 6 SATA ports).

 

[expediter]

You might want to review this thread before you decide to buy that board. They have been failing a lot..
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/please-help.46766/page-2#post-321255

I did see that, but mentally discounted that, as I also heard that on the iX system, Freenas Mini XL, the airflow was poor and noisy. So I concluded that as heat is a killer for boards, that may have a lot to do with the failings. I also read that actually having NAS drives too cold would cause them to fail early, and decided that perhaps the iX team took both of these items into account when designing their system.

Have you checked the guide we have here?

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

I reviewed that thread, but as I don't have any experience with server equipment, I found it a little over my head as far as the equipment went. I will look it over some more and perhaps it will click for me.
Edit:
Ok I'm an Idiot, I looked that whole thread over and although everyone seemed to be speaking of a particular document, but I just kept on the roundy-round of clicking the find the hardware guide here link. (thread) I just discovered this good size orange box with the DOWNLOAD NOW! on it. Sigh.....

 

[expediter]

In addition to the hardware guide (which is highly recommended), you could look at a pre-built server. The Proliant ML10, for example, isn't the deal it once was (it was previously under $200 with an i3), but even at its current configuration/price it's a good choice--just add an 8 GB stick of RAM, a boot device, and your storage drives, and you'll be good to go. The Dell PowerEdge T30 is another inexpensive choice (starts at $179 with 4 GB of RAM and a G4400, includes a 1 TB hard drive that you wouldn't want to use for FreeNAS but could use elsewhere)--again, add an 8 GB stick of RAM, a boot device, and your storage drives. The T30 limits you to 4 storage drives, though; I'm not sure if it would be practical to increase that (though I'd bet the motherboard has at least 6 SATA ports).

As I understand, I am required to have 1 GB ram for each TB of hard drive. As I expect to have 32 TB total, and as I estimate it, 16TB net, I am required to have 32GB or more of ram. I prefer if possible to use more, thus the reason why I (potentially) need to find some 16 GB sticks in order to populate a board with only 4 slots with a ram cap of 64.
If my reasoning is off, I appreciate any corrections.

 

[Chris Moore]

The more RAM you have, potentially, the better ZFS can perform, but the rule of thumb about 1 GB per TB of storage is just a thumb rule, it's not a hard-and-fast guideline.

Also, if you plan on running virtual machines, you need more memory for each of those as well.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[danb35]

As I understand, I am required to have 1 GB ram for each TB of hard drive.

That is a very loose, and deliberately vague, rule of thumb, though using 16 GB DIMMs to expand memory is probably a good idea. Replace "8 GB" with "16 GB" in my post above, and you'd likely be good (and you'd have plenty of room to expand if you needed to).

 

[nojohnny101]

If all you are doing is seeing up a few shares and there are too many concurrent users (say 1-3), you'll be just fine with 16GB. Now as @danb35 said, if you start running VMs, you'll need more most likely.