Please Critique: FreeNAS 8 RAID Z2 Build

[holzmann]

Any foreseeable problems with the following hardware?

AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz CPU
ASUS M4A88T-M Mobo w/ onboard ATI Radeon HD 4250
Silverstone Strider 500W PS
Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333 ECC Memory
Intel EXPI9301CT NIC
4x Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB 5400 RPM

Thanks for the comments and Happy Thanksgiving!

 

[b1ghen]

I have a similar build with the exact same motherboard and an Athlon II X3 450 (with the fourth core unlocked).
I'm using 6x Seagate Green 2TB drives in this one, all connected to the motherboard SATA ports.
And I'm only using 4GB Kingston ECC so far but will be adding another 4GB soon.

I'm using the onboard Realtek so far and it's not stellar in any way but it get's the job done so far. Looking into changing that into an Intel like you are planning.

I do see an improvement with using only 4 drives for a RAIDZ2, in my opinion it would be better with mirrors instead and you will have the same available storage but better performance and you can add drives 2 at a time instead of 4 at a time.

 

[jgreco]

Only downside there is that certain combinations of two drives dying causes you to lose data. Depending on how much you value your data, that may or may not be the best way to go.

 

[b1ghen]

Only downside there is that certain combinations of two drives dying causes you to lose data. Depending on how much you value your data, that may or may not be the best way to go.

Agreed, I forgot about that. Anyhow I don't see any problem with the components.