Proposed home storage server - request for sanity check

[jal]

Howdy, folks. I have my evil plan, I think, and wanted to see if anyone was willing to critique it and point out the likely lurking dragons. For background, I'm a unix person doing devops professionally, used FreeBSD and Solaris extensively in the 90s, and since then most everything I use daily has become linux, aside from an OS X front end. I have no direct experience with FreeNAS yet, but have administered a few Netapp filers and largish NFS servers and a bunch of various more mundane office file server type things, and keep meaning to find something to do with FreeBSD again.

This setup is to serve my household, which includes a light computer user who stores a lot of photography and video, my archive of crap I've built or collected since I got out of school, and will serve a pile of machines which will become an Openstack cluster once this is running solidly and I can get around to it. (The openstack VMs will take over various functions, like running a build farm, lightly used mail service, some lightly used web apps I run for the extended family, "juke-box" iTunes service, and various temporary installs of things when I'm experimenting with new software. And probably something I'm forgetting.), There will be two of them, the plan being to sync them up after the initial build and then stick one in an office in a nearby town, and sync them over the net. No TV-related needs.

Anyway, hardware-wise, I'm looking at the ASRock C2750D4I motherboard, 32G (2x16) Crucial EEC RAM, leaving the option to go to 64 if need be, 6x WD Red 6TB disks, and the inevitable Sandisk thumb drive. All sitting in a Li Lian PC-Q08 case. The case seems to have a 2.5" slot in case an SSD for L2ARC makes sense someday, but from what I've read I kind of doubt it ever would.

Configuration-wise, I can't come up with a good reason to create multiple volumes. There are two human users who don't need to segregate files from one another and a bunch of machine roles administered by me. One thing I thought of as a possibility was for OS X Time Machine backups, but I'm considering putting those inside DMGs so I could both encapsulate the millions of hard links and limit growth that way. Another was to use one for logs and similar so as to not have to replicate them, but I think I want my logs in both places.

Questions -
- Can quotas be added after volume creation? That seems likely, but I couldn't find anything one way or the other in the docs and I'm trying not to take things for granted, coming at this from zero. I don't think I want quotas, but in the past have used them to keep unruly software in check, so the option is nice.
- I am planning on using disk encryption. Other than "don't lose the key", does anyone have reasons why this might be a bad idea, or can think of things I should consider? The 2750 apparently does have the AES instructions.
- I'm planning on bonding the two NICs. I haven't seen a ton of discussion of this. Are there any lurking issues to consider? My switch can handle it.
- Any concerns with replication? Given expected data change rates, I don't expect bandwidth to be an issue.
- Am I missing anything else?

Thanks so much for reading.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not aware of any 16GB sticks from Crucial that will work in that board. Check if they are registered or not (only unregistered/unbuffered RAM is compatible with the C2750D4I.

 

[Ericloewe]

Crucial only has 16GB RDIMMs, not UDIMMs. That won't work. I'm afraid you're limited to regular 8GB UDIMMs or the extra-rare and somewhat dubious 16GB UDIMMs from I'M.

 

[jal]

Thanks for the replies. You're both right, of course; I didn't look closely enough at Crucial's part numbers. Thanks for the catch.

In reading more (particularly the notes in peoples' .sigs), it looks like lots of folks have gone with 16G. I tend to subscribe to the more==usually barely enough school of RAM, but for what amounts to a pretty small workload in my case, perhaps that's enough.