Suggestions on server build

[richfear]

So I've been lurking here for a while and now I"m ready to build a real FreeNAS box.What I'm looking for it to be able to do is fairly simple so all suggestions are welcome. What I want it to do is be a simple file server, hold non critical system/file backups, and to start a Plex server that currently will only be doing 1 4K and 1 HD stream at the very most. Most of the time it'll be just doing 1 of something but in the future it might get to 2 of some combo. Also, what's the concensus of desktop hdds vs NAS rated ones? I've seen places that say there's no major difference while others do. I've seen plenty of big name NAS' with desktop drives and last many years with no issues.

I do have the case already, Fractal R4.

Any and all suggestions welcome. Thank you!

 

[kdragon75]

What has your research been telling you? Have you found the hardware guides here?

 

[kdragon75]

Also, what's the concensus of desktop hdds vs NAS rated [drives]

Generaly the NAS rated drive will be faster and more reliable but to what extent is debatable. This of course excludes the "Green" drives as they will wear out fasted due to the constant sleep (head park) wake cycles caused by the NAS.

 

[kdragon75]

Personally I got a bunch of second hand datacenter drives with years of run time and have yet to see any issues. I sure I will but haven't yet!

 

[richfear]

What has your research been telling you?

Well, from what I can gather, it seems that the E3 Xeon that Chris recommends a lot should work just fine for the current usage, but it'll unknown for the near future.

Have you found the hardware guides here?

I have and while it's a great starting point, it is rather vague. It's also hard to write something like that for every case and I do get that. The one issue I have is that it doesn't go real in depth on what boards go with an E5 Xeon. It touches on them but doesn't go into great detail. Yes, I should and will have to do more research on them to see what works with them board and memory wise. But I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone else has a similar system to if the pros here know of tried and true combos.

I'd rather not get the wrong stuff and then have to try and resell it on eBay later after I find I screwed up.

 

[richfear]

Generaly the NAS rated drive will be faster and more reliable but to what extent is debatable. This of course excludes the "Green" drives as they will wear out fasted due to the constant sleep (head park) wake cycles caused by the NAS.

That's pretty much what I've seen as well. I would /stay away from the green drives for sure. But would the NSA drives really be faster than say 7.2K desktop drives?

As for your datacenter drives, I saw some 4TB HHST Terrascale drives for a great price and was wondering about them.

 

[kdragon75]

Supermicro is a popular brand for system boards around here. As for the RAM, once you find a board, take a look at the compatibility list for that board. A lot of people over build here but if your transcoding 4k a solid CPU will be important. don't worry about buying gobs of RAM. Anything 16GB or more will be fine. The ARC (read cache) will use as much is you put in the box but for streaming/backups you wont see a big much benefit.

As for the NAS drives, some may have better seek times than others but in your case I cant imagine you would see any real world difference. The HGSTs are great drives but it's hit and miss buying on Amazon. Any route you take with drives, do a burn-in/test on them before you start loading data. Another thing to mention while were talking about drives is the ZFS RAID. Most people say 3TB and up, run RAIDz2 or mirrors. The odds of a second drive failing during replacement/rebuild are just too high. I have seen a number of threads where pools have been lost. Take this into consideration as a part of your capacity planning.

 

[richfear]

I guess I should have been a bit more specific when I meant the Plex stuff. I'll mostly be using an nVidia Shield for streaming of movies with this NAS, so I may or may not use Plex as the Shield will do it on it's own so transcoding won't be necessary with Plex, it'll really just be streaming the data, same goes with the HD stuff. Only time a transcode would be needed is if the device displaying it isn't 4K then Plex would have to transcode it to HD for the device's output.

But if I do go the E5 route, what version is the suggested one, v1, 2 or 3? Buying server gear is quote new and greek to me.

 

[kdragon75]

I little googling found that v2 and down are DDR3 while v3 and up are DDR4. You wont need the extra memory bandwidth. Also if you stick with the v2 and old, parts become much cheaper. Personal I'm running a second hand Dell R510 (see my sig) and its plenty fast. I can more than saturate 10gb Ethernet. You can definitely do better for power consumption but this is what I had on hand.