Hello everyone.
I was planning to build a desktop for more 'consumer'-ish purposes like rendering, web surfing and gaming, and the thought struck me: could I repurpose my FreeNAS box? It has potential to be a fairly powerful desktop system, given its current specs:
ASRock Rack E3C236D2I mini-ITX motherboard
Intel Pentium G4500 CPU
1 x 16 GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz UDIMM
Fractal Design Node 304
2 x WD Red 3 TB 5400 RPM drives
1 x SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16 GB boot drive
I was planning to purchase a used Xeon E3 v5 CPU (haven't exactly decided which one) to replace my puny Pentium while still keeping the ECC capability. Then I was planning to add an nVidia GeForce GTX/AMD Radeon RX video card as well, hook up a monitor and peripherals, and using the entire machine as a desktop, possibly with a hypervisor running Windows and FreeNAS. I was also thinking of adding a couple of 4 TB drives, and re-creating my entire volume with RAIDZ1, of four drives in total (2 x 3 TB, 2 x 4 TB). I also encode a fair bit of video, and I have a ton of raw video left to encode which I currently do on my notebook. I like the idea of having a proper Xeon handling all that, and offload everything to the server-cum-desktop.
Is this a good idea, or should I leave my FreeNAS box well alone (save the CPU upgrade)?
I was planning to build a desktop for more 'consumer'-ish purposes like rendering, web surfing and gaming, and the thought struck me: could I repurpose my FreeNAS box? It has potential to be a fairly powerful desktop system, given its current specs:
ASRock Rack E3C236D2I mini-ITX motherboard
Intel Pentium G4500 CPU
1 x 16 GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz UDIMM
Fractal Design Node 304
2 x WD Red 3 TB 5400 RPM drives
1 x SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16 GB boot drive
I was planning to purchase a used Xeon E3 v5 CPU (haven't exactly decided which one) to replace my puny Pentium while still keeping the ECC capability. Then I was planning to add an nVidia GeForce GTX/AMD Radeon RX video card as well, hook up a monitor and peripherals, and using the entire machine as a desktop, possibly with a hypervisor running Windows and FreeNAS. I was also thinking of adding a couple of 4 TB drives, and re-creating my entire volume with RAIDZ1, of four drives in total (2 x 3 TB, 2 x 4 TB). I also encode a fair bit of video, and I have a ton of raw video left to encode which I currently do on my notebook. I like the idea of having a proper Xeon handling all that, and offload everything to the server-cum-desktop.
Is this a good idea, or should I leave my FreeNAS box well alone (save the CPU upgrade)?