Old pc parts to NAS

[seeway]

Hello everyone,

I'm thinking on making a NAS for personal things. It will be for torrent, plex, and storage.
ASROCK G41M-VS3 R2.0 + E8400 + 8 Gb ram + pendrive for OS + 1 Tb for data
Other config is Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L + xeon e5462

my pior would be the ASROCK + E8400 because of the size of the board.

 

[Inxsible]

Hello everyone,

I'm thinking on making a NAS for personal things. It will be for torrent, plex, and storage.
ASROCK G41M-VS3 R2.0 + E8400 + 8 Gb ram + pendrive for OS + 1 Tb for data
Other config is Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L + xeon e5462

my pior would be the ASROCK + E8400 because of the size of the board.

You can probably use the old parts for FreeNAS, but ECC RAM is recommended for FreeNAS, which means your MB and processor should also support ECC. The E8400, I know doesn't.

The Xeon E5462 is super old and I don't believe it supports ECC either.

About that 1 TB for data : how do you intend to configure the disks? Do you have only 1 disk or 2x500GB or some other combination? With 1 disk, you won't get any redundancy at all.

 

[seeway]

I don't think the MB supports ECC, but I didn't know its require. Will it run with non-EEC ram?
For now I'm on low budget I have everything except the RAM.
I thought I will test this machine with only 1x1Tb storage and later 1 more disk.

 

[Inxsible]

I don't think the MB supports ECC, but I didn't know its require. Will it run with non-EEC ram?
For now I'm on low budget I have everything except the RAM.
I thought I will test this machine with only 1x1Tb storage and later 1 more disk.

No, ECC RAM is not a requirement but a recommendation. It will run with non-ECC RAM and many users here do run desktop grade hardware. But we have also seen our share of threads where the user's data pools get corrupted and they were using non-recommended hardware.

If you are going to give FreeNAS a whirl, just to see how it is and whether you want to keep it long term, then by all means use the old hardware. But once you decide that FreeNAS is for you, then be prepared to buy the proper hardware.

I wouldn't put that hardware in use for my data.

 

[seeway]

Thank you very much! I will give it a try.

 

[danb35]

The Xeon E5462 is super old and I don't believe it supports ECC either.

Yeah, it's a 10-year-old CPU, and the front-side bus will kill performance. I don't see that ark.intel.com indicates ECC support one way or the other, but it's possible that with chips this old, the memory controller (and thus support, or lack thereof, for ECC) isn't built into the CPU.