Is it worth it?

[Rysis]

Hello everyone,

Over the past few year my pile of spare equipment has been growing and I thought I would make something useful out of it but this is all starting to get a bit over the top now.

What I had originally intended for a small build:

X10SLQ-L (does not support ECC)
Intel I3-4330
8 GIG of Non ECC RAM
(2) WD Green 2 terabyte drives
(2) WD Green 3 terabyte drives

I have stacks of hard disks laying around from 80-500 gigs that I would like to rip the images from and any data worth keeping so that I can clean them up or dispose of them. I would like storage space and maybe 20 or so movies. It would be nice if I can access that data remotely and securely at some point down the road.

Being that my requirements are fairly low can I get dependable storage from non-ecc memory on that board? Maybe I should not use ZFS or just backup everything on to two separate drives and save myself hours of frustration? I don't mind putting in some time but I don't want the end result to be a server rack that sucks up more power than the refrigerator.

OR the other option ....

I have two HP ML350 G4's that I could strip the 3.2 GHz Xeons (E7520 Chipset) and DDR2 RAM from and look for a compatable motherboard. I don't want a full rack server running for occational use. That and SATA drives are far cheaper.

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance!

 

[Chris Moore]

Hello everyone,

- snip -

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance!

We get this kind of question at least a time or two each week and to tell you the truth, ZFS is not always the right answer for everyone. It is the best thing going (my opinion) but it does have some higher requirements because it was originally made to be an "enterprise" grade solution to the problem of data loss from drive failure AND the problem of corruption of data at rest due to bit-rot. So, I guess it really depends on how much the data matters to you. If you are willing to cut a few corners because your family won't kill you if you loose all the family photos, options are out there.

Have you looked at the hardware guide in the resource section?

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

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

 

[Rysis]

I did not but will do so now. Thanks much for the feedback and links.