Old PC parts. Will it work?

[zze86]

I've read through the hardware requirements of freenas and think I can put together a freenas system for cheap to play around with but I wanted to run the specs by the experts. These are mostly parts scrounged off old PCs and my parts bin with a couple of parts planned to purchase off ebay.

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3P - Intel P45 chipset
Intel Core 2 Quad Q3200 CPU
8gb (4 x 2gb) G.Skill 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM
32GB Innodisk SATADOM (for boot drive, $20 on ebay)
120GB Intel 330 SSD (for cache)
8 x 120GB Seagate Barracuda HDDs for storage
LSI 9210-8i PCIe SATA controller ($20 on ebay)
2 x SFF8087 to 4 SATA cable ($12 for two cables on ebay)
NZXT Tempest mid-tower case
550W power supply

I was going to run the boot drive and SSD off the motherboard (8xSATA ports) with the 9210 controlling the HDDs. Since the board does not have onboard graphics, I have an old GPU in there for now but will be taking that out once I get the system running. Again, really just testing and playing with freenas at this point but would eventually like to swap in some real drives for use as a NAS and media server.

Questions:
Will it work? Or better question, SHOULD it work? lol.
With the LSI SATA controller, do I need to check or do anything to it to make it compatible with the system? This page suggests I should at least check the firmware.

TIA!

 

[JohnDigital]

I bet it will work just fine. Take the time and disable any fancy features in that MB, you wont be needing sound and whatnot. I think its a good practice machine.

 

[Nick2253]

You could definitely run FreeNAS on that hardware, but I'm not sure it would be worth it. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If your goal is to learn more about FreeNAS, then I'd say go forth and prosper! But if you're trying to actually build a working NAS, you might want to rethink a few things.

For starters, those old Core2Quad systems are insanely power hungry. Like, hundreds of watts hungry. The cost of newer hardware may easily be offset by the power savings.

Your 120GB HDDs scare me a bit. Those things are probably 10+ years old. And with the low density platters, you're not going to get great throughput, and your random I/O is going to be terrible. Even assuming you go with a RAIDZ1, that's only ~840 GB of total storage.

If you use the 120GB SSD as a cache drive, it may actually slow the system down. L2ARC drives require some memory to manage, so adding L2ARC adds relatively slow flash at the cost of screaming fast RAM (L1ARC). It might be better to use the SSD as a SLOG, if you want to use it at all.

If I were in your shoes, I would look at the following upgrades:

• Newer platform. You can buy older workstation computers off eBay for pretty cheaply (~$200). However, even if you stick with the C2Q platform, I'd get some more memory. At least 16GB.
• Newer hard drives. With the LSI card, you could run SAS drives. eBay also has a bunch of 1-2TB SAS drives that go for under $30 apiece. Two of these drives will give you a mirror with more space, and you'd again be looking at some pretty nice power savings. Plus, you'd be able to keep growing your zpool with mirrors as you need more space.
• Power Supply - old power supplies are common points of failure. Assuming that this is an equally old power supply, consider setting aside some cash to buy a new on when it fails.

 

[zze86]

Thanks for the confirmation and warnings! This is definitely just a "muck around with it" rig! The PSU is an older unit but very low runtime so should still have plenty of life left.

I've actually been eyeing some used Dell Poweredge servers but am not quite sure how I feel about having full on server gear. The hot-swappable drives is a nice feature but seems like more cost with trays, storage and upkeep. Maybe, I'm wrong? Have also been looking at an AMD 3400G mini ITX system. Both are around the $350-$400 mark. What workstation(s) would you suggest I look into?

 

[Nick2253]

I've actually been eyeing some used Dell Poweredge servers but am not quite sure how I feel about having full on server gear. The hot-swappable drives is a nice feature but seems like more cost with trays, storage and upkeep. Maybe, I'm wrong?

For a typical homelab use-case, hot-swappable drives are overkill. You have no uptime requirements, so it's really just a convenience factor. Whereas, in enterprise land, you must be able to remove bad drives from running systems in order to keep everything up as much as possible.

I wouldn't say that there's more upkeep with server gear. If anything, server gear tends to be more reliable than consumer gear. The upkeep may come from you tinkering with it more .

Have also been looking at an AMD 3400G mini ITX system.

When I built my FreeNAS system, I went with a mini ITX form factor, and in hindsight, I think that was a mistake. It's awesome and tiny, but everything is more expensive, and it's much harder to find replacement parts, and you generally have many fewer upgrade options. MicroATX in my opinion is the sweet spot between size and features.

What workstation(s) would you suggest I look into?

Both Dell and HP have some pretty great workstations on eBay. If you do an eBay search for "Xeon Workstation", you'll find a bunch of results.

My home hypervisor is a Dell T7500 with 2x X5660 processors and 72GB of memory. I bought it around 5 years ago for ~$300, and added the second processor and most of the memory. Probably spent around $500 total on it. For a FreeNAS system it's not great since it only has 4 drive bays.

However, you can always get something like this 3.5" to 5.25" chassis to add 5x hdds to 3x 5.25" bays. Note: I have no idea if that particular chassis would fit inside any of the Dell or HP workstations.

For my next FreeNAS system, my plan is to get an HP Z420 workstation. These single-processor workstations are pretty affordable (regularly available for under $200 shipped on eBay), and come with support for up to 64GB of RAM. They use E5 v2 CPUs, which are pretty dang efficient, and plenty powerful for a FreeNAS system. The three front 5.25" bays can probably fit one of the 5x HDD chassis (may require slight modification), which brings it up to 8x drives. The motherboard has 10 SATA connectors to support all the drives. If I wanted more drives, I would 3D print brackets to hold another 4x drives to the bottom of the case, and add an LSI (or similar) SAS card.

I've also thought about getting a smaller workstation and then using a SAS expander with my existing case, or getting a different case with more drive support. However, I think a setup like that only makes sense if I'm trying to go beyond 12 drives.

 

[ThreeDee]

Thanks for the confirmation and warnings! This is definitely just a "muck around with it" rig! The PSU is an older unit but very low runtime so should still have plenty of life left.

I've actually been eyeing some used Dell Poweredge servers but am not quite sure how I feel about having full on server gear. The hot-swappable drives is a nice feature but seems like more cost with trays, storage and upkeep. Maybe, I'm wrong? Have also been looking at an AMD 3400G mini ITX system. Both are around the $350-$400 mark. What workstation(s) would you suggest I look into?

I took a chance on some "Chinese Knock-offs" and I'm glad I did .. my setup (in sig) was pretty inexpensive and has been running 24/7 since I first set it up (I forget how many months ago now) without issue .. only rebooting to upgrade TrueNAS.

It's a quad-channel mobo so the ECC DDR3 RDIMMS perform on par with DDR4 memory and they can be found on ebay for real cheap. I initially paid $125 for motherboard, cpu and 32GB's of ECC DDR3 that I sold to offset the price of getting 64GB's. The case was on sale from Newegg for $30 ..LSI card was $25 off of ebay and nvidia quadro card was $10'ish used. Drives I bought used from various sources for about a buck a gig..

Don't skimp on the PSU and I recommend getting 80+ Gold at least from a reputable brand..

One thing with this motherboard though is that it doesn't like M.2 SATA drives ...doesn't see them ..but you're golden using an NVMe SSD drive

Just another option for you if this is just for home use.