BUILD New to NAS, decided to go DIY

[arnaiyus]

After doing some research for a couple of weeks, I've decided to let go the idea of grabbing a disk-less enclosure (was looking at QNAP) and decided to go the DIY path. One of my coworkers has made his NAS that way and is currently using FreeNAS, so of course that helped my final decision. I'm making the jump to NAS because in my current situation, I have too many Internal and External drives and thought that centralizing everything in one storage solution would be best.

I was originally looking for a 4-bay enclosure and was thinking of going with 4 2TB REDs and put them in RAID5...but then some doubt hit. What if I need more storage at some point? Which is when I started looking at Mini-ITXs (I want to minimize the space it takes) with lots of SATA ports. Here's what I'm looking at right now.

Case: LIAN LI PC-Q08B
Motherboard: ASRock FM2A85X-ITX FM2 AMD A85X
CPU: AMD A4-5300 Trinity 3.4GHz Socket FM2 65W Dual-Core Desktop
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 15000)
Disks: Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB x4
The lack of PSU is simply because my coworker has an extra one still sitting in it's original package, a 500w one if I'm correct.
I'll buy an 8go USB stick for the image at a local shop.

The purpose of this NAS will be mainly for storage (one-time write of a huge archive of videos/pictures/music/ISOs/backup projects) and to then stream videos and music from it. I've heard FreeNAS can also manage Torrents (confirm/deny?), that would be great as well. Other than that, the occasional addition of one or two videos in said archive. Max number of users will most likely be 2-3, but 85% of the time, it will only be me.

Now the real question I have is if I do a RAID-Z with this build, can I then buy 3 more WD20EFRX 2TB, create another vDev with them and add them to the zPool? Have I been reading about this correctly? This is the only concern that I have for now. There's always the solution of going RAID5 and just add more drives as I see the need for it, but I'm fairly certain RAID-Z is superior. I'm limiting myself to 4 disks at the moment because of my budget and also because I won't be needing more than the projected 6TB I can get with this build for now.

Can anyone guide me with this?

Thanks for the read.

 

[gpsguy]

Nice case - mine is sitting in the closet... Hopefully your coworker's "extra" PSU is modular. There isn't much room for cabling in the case.

You are correct - to expand you'd need to crate another vdev and add it to the pool. Each vdev would have it's parity disk.

Since the motherboard only has 2 slots for RAM, I'd start with at least 16Gb, given your future plans. Do you have plans for the PCI/e slot? If not, I'd suggest you consider an Intel Pro/1000. It will probably give you better performance than the onboard Realtek.

 

[arnaiyus]

It's not modular, I'll have tons of fun with that, I know.

I know that an Intel NIC would be better, but I know that some people say that using stock can still give you pretty good numbers. I'm not a speed maniac and I won't be transferring stuff that often, but if it becomes an issue at some point, I'll certainly try an Intel NIC.

As for the RAM, well I'll really only be using the four 2tb disks for a long time. Combined, I'd say that all the current data that's going on the NAS weighs around 2.2tb and I don't think I'll be able to double that in maybe 2-3 years. I chose this setup because if I ever have an "Oh shit I need more space NOW", I can do it.

Thanks for the reply though, once I receive the parts and build this little guy, I'll post some results.