Rate my build!

[surfrock66]

Ok, full disclosure, this is my old build which I just replaced with a supermicro chassis, motherboard, and proper backplane/HBA. This build ran from about 2014 until January 2021, and now that it's decommissioned, I thought it'd be kind of fun to share.

This ran flawlessly for the whole time. This is clearly a garbage build, but I see that as a testament to FreeNAS/TrueNAS...it kept my data safe even running on a dumpster.

This was a BIOSTAR NM70I-1037U motherboard with a Intel Celeron 1037U Dual-Core 1.8GHz CPU, 16GB RAM. There is a single SATA Expander card. The onboard 1GB NIC is a Realtek RTL8111F which is unsupported in BSD and had terrible issues with dropping connection; to bypass this, I had a USB 2.0 10/100 USB NIC which I velcro'd to the back of the chassis and that is what I ran my entire NAS off of for like 7 years. Speaking of the chassis...I had rails and aluminum, so I made something to fit in 4U.

This was a totally absurd piece of my infrastructure and it's amazing it lasted as long as it did; but I have successfully done a planned decom of it which I consider a victory as opposed to having to deal with a crisis when it burst into flames.

 

[Heracles]

One thing to avoid : Never put computers on carpet. Static will damage your components and will create you problems that will be very hard to diagnose.

 

[surfrock66]

Oh this is decommissioned; it's all replaced. I thought about finding another chassis and seeing if that motherboard can run Minecraft for one of my kids, but that's essentially e-waste. I'm not even tied to the drives.