Making the most of leftovers...

[H0mersimps0n]

my parents gave me their old Dell Dimension e521 ( http://www.ktechpc.com/delle521/e521.htm )
and I have four drives leftover from an old HP NAS my uncle gave me (500,500,1.5,1.5)

SO, my background - currently I am running two other NAS in my house. I have an old Thecus N5200 (RAID 5 running five 500GB HDs) and Leftover rig #1 (RAID 5 with four 1tb drives) running Openfiler flawlessly for years.

The e521 is not up-grade friendly so I want to put it to some good use and figure a 3400+ AMD should be able to rock out an Openfiler or Freenas setup.

I'm opting for FreeNas because of the PLEX PLUGIN. Recently I've paired my Roku3 with Plex and Plex server (on a desktop) serving files off my Openfiler rig.

I want to all-in-one this setup - put the server on the FreeNas and run my movies off this last rig.

**PROBLEMS**
I've been short on time and hastily selected SATA cards I thought would make most sense without researching the best options for FreeBSD based setup like FreeNas (Openfiler worked great with my dollar store controllers so I just assumed a well established software like FreeNas/FreeBSD would be the same)..

I bought:
1. SYBA SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express x1 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card
2. SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 4 Port RAID 0/1/5/10 JBOD Card
from newegg to fill the open PCI and PCI-e 1x slots on the [crappy] motherboard.

#1 has the completely unsupported Marvell chip and #2 has the partially supported Silicon Image 3124 (which I tried to flash to firmware 6.6 but still couldn't get to work).

The great news was my FreeNas install/first run from my USB dongle went perfectly - web GUI up and running FIRST TRY! Unfortunately, neither controller shows any drives available in FreeNas. If I plug the drives into the motherboard SATA header they appear.

I see many people choose the IBM M1015 but even on ebay thats more than I wanted to spend on this piece-meal POS setup.

Does anyone see or know if any way to get either of those two controller cards working? Suggestions on any other very inexpensive controller cards I should use?

I'd like to add four more hard drives into this case and get four 2TB Red WD's...

Should I abandon my dream of running Plex on FreeNas all together?

Thanks for your patience everyone!

 

[cyberjock]

You can't get those working. You have to buy compatible hardware for FreeNAS/FreeBSD or go with a different product. The M1015 is the controller of choice because it is the most inexpensive controller you're going to find on a per-port basis.

Plex with transcoding is probably not going to work on your machine. But you won't know for certainty until you try it.

 

[H0mersimps0n]

You can't get those working. You have to buy compatible hardware for FreeNAS/FreeBSD or go with a different product. The M1015 is the controller of choice because it is the most inexpensive controller you're going to find on a per-port basis.

Plex with transcoding is probably not going to work on your machine. But you won't know for certainty until you try it.

where do you envision the bottleneck for plex not working [well] with my setup?

 

[cyberjock]

Your CPU. ZFS has CPU needs. You'll almost certainly be doing file shares too. Both of those are going to steal CPU cycles and you already seem pretty low in the "CPU processing power" department.

Of course, it looks like that board maxes out at either 4GB or 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum for ZFS for the system to run stable and have any resemblence of performance. Adding Plex is going to need a little bit more RAM. The fact that you will already be starting out either at the maximum or below it should be a red flag to reconsider your build(especially if you are spending money on it).

You were absolutely right when you said its not upgrade-friendly. Unfortunately, looking at the link you gave, you are already in the realm of needing upgrades.

 

[H0mersimps0n]

well glad I asked before pushing ahead with the purchase of any other hardware to get this rig going with FreeNas - guess I'll have to find other uses for this rig.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[ddan24]

SI-PEX40064 is supported in FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x64 (a752d35) as it is what I am running and i'm using this exact card.