Looking to get my feet wet. Opinions?

[tuxer]

I'm building a new PC and wanting to turn my old one into strictly a family streaming server with Plex. Hoping to check on my specs and get a little knowledge thrown my way to help my setup for future upgrades. The "Potential HDD" section below is in regards to my WD MyCloud that has the two Red 4TB drives and I also have two 500GB Seagate drives from laptops I no longer use laying around.

CPU: i5 3570k
Mobo: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 4x4GB DDR3 1600
SSD: 120GB
HDD: 2xWD Green 3TB, 1 WD Blue 4TB
Potential HDD: 2xWD Red 4TB, 2x500GB Seagate

As stated above, this is strictly going to be for storage (pictures, music, TV and movies) with no more than two streams at a time. No 4k, at least now or the near future, at most 1080p but primarily 720. The only real important data I don't want to lose are pictures and music, I can live with losing movies and TV shows as I can recreate them. It would suck, but I'd be OK with it. Music the same, but to me, that's more important. I currently use FreeFileSync to sync to a WD MyCloud device that is plugged in periodically for the backup. With all that said, I'd prefer to leave the MyCloud in the equation which I will eventually have two pairs of drives to swap on occassion and bring the spares into my office.

Any concerns you see with the specs outside of storage? I know I still have a lot of research and learning to do, but if you were me, how would you configure zfs that would allow you to add a drive or two in the far future for more space? I'm trying to wrap my head around FreeNAS the best I can, but still have a long way to go. If my research so far has been correct, you can't add a new drive to a zpool but you can replace/upgrade one of the drives. And if that is indeed correct, I'm thinking it would be a good idea to have the 2x500GB Seagate drives in the zpool more to be used as place holders for future upgrades. I may take the two red drives out of the MyCloud and swap them with the green. I don't need access speed for the MyCloud.

I feel a bit over my head with all this but hope I'm on the right track. If I'm way off then I'll have to keep Windows running on the old box until I have a better grasp of FreeNAS. Thanks for any input.

 

[Chris Moore]

I would ask if you took time to read the hardware guide in the resources section? If you did, and you still choose to use this hardware, it might be able to work, but it is less than ideal. I just don't want you to blame FreeNAS if something doesn't work is all.

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/

 

[tuxer]

Honestly, just skimmed it a few times to see if anything problematic popped out immediately. Bookmarked it for later but my immediate concern became understanding storage and whether FreeNAS fit my needs or not. I'll read the documents in their entirety. Sorry, should've done that first.

 

[brianm]

TU, I was about to write to you with a couple of hints but Chris beat me to one of the main items. The "heavyweight" advisors on this forum like Chris are extremely patient, helpful and knowledgeable. They are also well aware of what it takes to produce a good FreeNAS system that will be a credit to the system and its owner and so the hardware recommendations were produced. Follow their advice closely if you wish to succeed. You can use the hardware you propose but you might be waving that valuable music and photography bye-bye.

Having said that, as a noob myself, I have learned a couple of things. One thing is that I would not overcomplicate the storage system.Work out the final capacity you need and then plan how to get there in the easiest and most economical way. Ten drive Raid sounds very impressive but the owners may regret them in the long run. I joined this forum knowing nothing about Raid so I was thinking in a far too complicated way - I ended up with 4 disks in a 2x2 mirror which to me was the best way to do things and it is very simple to set up and maintain. For backup purposes stuff like photos and music which are really almost archive items are treated very differently than rapidly changing data is. The second thing I would advise is to build your system to final specs. the first time around. Data storage is pretty cheap so it really is not worth the hassle of building your system with temporary disks that may be a pain to replace in the future.

As a point of reference a 2x2 mirror array gives you a volume size of about half of the total disk space. I have 2TB disks so in a 2x2 array I have about 2GB of actual storage which is fine for my present needs.

Good luck

 

[tuxer]

Thanks guys for your input and suggestions. I think my best course of action is to keep the PC running Windows for now and learn a little more about FreeNAS. May have jumped too quickly.

 

[Chris Moore]

FreeNAS is one of the very best systems for storage and you can get into it with a fairly low starting investment, but it does not work as reliably with common desktop components.
It depends on how much storage you will need, and you will want to figure it out ahead of time.
If you want to setup a system with the hardware that you already have, you can, I just don't want you to think that the software alone makes it the best. The FreeNAS operating system needs rock solid hardware to run smoothly.
Let me know if you are interested, I can make a suggestion for how to get the most out of the parts you have.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[brianm]

TU, excuse me jumping in again but I don't want you to feel that anything I said was intended as a discouragement.
Here is my testimony concerning my build and how it proceeded.

First, although I am a newbie with Freenas (and servers in general) I do have quite a few years experience in embedded logic programming. It is simply that with the type of projects we worked on there was very little serial i/o., no disk drives, no CPUs and no discrete RAM. Regardless, of course, I picked up a general knowledge of these subjects but certainly not to pro. level so I call myself a Freenas noobie, which is true.

I needed a server, I knew this much. Since I had a bunch of old parts in storage I figured I could use these. I had mobo's, CPUs, RAM sticks, NICs cards, disk drives - what else could I possibly need. Then I read the hardware requirements and realized that most of the stuff I had was useless to build a low-level pro-grade system. So back to the drawing board.

I thought I might as well start with a system designed for use as a server so I started shopping.

1. Dell T110 ll case with motherboard, power supply and proper Intel E3-1220 server CPU from Craigslist with original H200 disk controller. No drives, no memory, no operating system. Note the ll in the model, there is also an older straight T110. $100.
2. To get this unit into operation I added:
32 Gig of used (correct) EEC RAM because everyone says Freenas loves RAM. $250.
4 off new WD Red 2TB drives initially connected directly to the motherboard SATA sockets. $340.
3. Samsung 256 G SSD for use as boot drive. On sale. $125.

I was now ready to load FreeNAS. This was perfectly simple and straight forward with no problems. I had more trouble with the Dell BIOS than I did with FreeNAS. I clearly would need to learn more about FreeNAS setup but the hardware I used ran without a hiccup and it is still running as I learn more. So for around $815 I have a solid bottom end professional server loaded with all the "good" parts and supported by they experts on the forum. Absolutely great deal.

It's so good I bought another identical machine for use with a pfSense router and now I am buying a 3rd unit for spares..

 

[Chris Moore]

You can get a very usable server, second hand, from eBay and other sellers, for a few hundred dollars.
If you want, I can make some suggestions.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Chris Moore]

If you were interested in purchasing something that would work straight away, just add drives, you could buy something like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precision-T7500-Workstation-6-Core-2-40GHz-E5645-24GB-RAM/171961119957
It is a workstation, but it has the Xeon CPU, ECC memory, etc. You can put hard drives in the four front 5.25 bays and it has four internal 3.5 bays, so you can easily put 8 hard drives in it and it can be upgraded all the way to 196 GB of RAM if needed.