Old PC into new FreeNAS?

joesnuggets

Cadet
Joined
Jun 17, 2019
Messages
1
Hi all,
Looking to put together a small NAS for personal use. I have an old custom PC, but it's a number of years old so hoping to get any input on what, if anything, I can keep. If need be, I'm not opposed to just starting over, but a penny saved...!
PC specs:
There's a seagate Barracuda 1TB drive that I'll have to replace, I'm looking to do the following:
  • Plex server (I don't think I need transcoding as they are all files I've burnt in the same format), 1-2 max concurrent users
  • 2-3TB of media files
Would love any thoughts/suggestions, both on the existing hardware and new drives. Not looking for high end enterprise usage, I could replace all of the files but it would be tedious. Thank you!
 

Bigsby

Dabbler
Joined
Jun 11, 2019
Messages
17
Looks pretty nicely specked for basic plex usage. With a good ammount of RAM if you have around 2-3TB
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
Moderator
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
10,970

Inxsible

Guru
Joined
Aug 14, 2017
Messages
1,123
Hi all,
Looking to put together a small NAS for personal use. I have an old custom PC, but it's a number of years old so hoping to get any input on what, if anything, I can keep. If need be, I'm not opposed to just starting over, but a penny saved...!
PC specs:
There's a seagate Barracuda 1TB drive that I'll have to replace, I'm looking to do the following:
  • Plex server (I don't think I need transcoding as they are all files I've burnt in the same format), 1-2 max concurrent users
  • 2-3TB of media files
Would love any thoughts/suggestions, both on the existing hardware and new drives. Not looking for high end enterprise usage, I could replace all of the files but it would be tedious. Thank you!
Since you already have this lying around. Absolutely, use it till it dies before building a server.

In addition to what @joeschmuck mentioned regarding the NIC, your case only supports 3 drives(including the conversion of the 5..25 to 3.5), so I think you are pretty much restricted to using just 2 drives in a mirror. Using RAIDZ1 with 3 drives just would be a tad risky during resilvering. Mirrors are much much faster during resilvering.

If you have 3 TB of media, use 2x6TB drives as a mirror and you should be good. That gives you some space to expand the media in the near future. Do not use more than 80% capacity of the drives as the performance will tank.
 
Top