Is this complete overkill?

[Roman217]

I'm looking to build an NAS to store all of pictures, which with RAW are starting to eat up a lot of space. I have been using external drives but, at this point, the data security just isn't there and space shrinks very quickly when you copy pictures to two drives for redundancy. So it's time that I put together an NAS that will mostly serve as a backup and partially as a media server. I will be working with the pictures when they are on the NAS but even at 30megs a picture, I think the gigabit ethernet should be just fine. It will be mostly single user.

Data security is the biggest priority and I plan running RAID-Z2 with a single hot spare potentially.

It will be connected to my computer via gigabit ethernet, haven't decided which router I'm going to use yet. Something with 3x3 draft n most likely to have decent access over wireless as well.

So this is the hardware I am looking at right now:
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128545

Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge 2.9GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 2000
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116397

Mushkin Enhanced Essentials 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226259

PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 750W Power Supply
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817703027

Western Digital RE4 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" x6 or x7
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136798

Considering doing a ZIL and L2ARC with these:
Corsair Force Series 3 60GB SATA III (SSD)
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233223

USB Flash Drive
SanDisk Cruzer Fit 8GB USB 2.0
--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171584

I'm still not 100% sure on the hard drives and whether I want to with 1tb or 2tb drives and whether I want to use the WD Reds or WD RE4s.

Motherboard was picked mainly on the fact that it has 9 SATA ports. I can also probably get away with just 16GB of ram, correct?

Would I benefit from having SSD for a ZIL and L2ARC or would it just be a waste?

Also, still planning on including a UPS but doing research to figure out which ones play well with FreeNAS.

So is this completely overkill for my needs?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Roman217]

I'm thinking that 16gigs of RAM and a 500 watt PSU should hold me over just fine. Thoughts?

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Yeah I'd drop the L2ARC, possibly the second set of RAM (and save that for an upgrade). You defintly don't need that much CPU if all your doing is pictures, but it's not expensive so doesn't matter. Definitely don't need 750W powersupply either, but it's all up to you.

You could also drip the ZIL for now if you want to save more money, I really doubt it will make a difference for 30MB files if your only using 1 at a time.

 

[Roman217]

Would I benefit from having an SSD for an L2ARC for working on video files? Sometimes those files will hit 10-12gb but mostly around 1-2gb.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Would I benefit from having an SSD for an L2ARC for working on video files? Sometimes those files will hit 10-12gb but mostly around 1-2gb.

I really doubt it, but I don't have a way of proving it. There is a perl script you can run that gives you information about how often your ARC cache threw out stuff before it was read. I suggest you create you system without the L2ARC, maybe with 32GB ram. Then run the script after using your systen for a week and see if L2ARC would have even been helpful. If you had 32GB ram your would already have a large ARC, which is much faster then L2ARC.

the link below has the arcstat script and some good information.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide