Thinking about jumping on the NAS hypetrain...

[tylerpnn]

Hi all,

I'm a long time linux user and so for my home server I have clung to a old school linux server setup for many years. I am a software engineer by trade but don't have a ton of experience with server administration. I run a Plex server which is shared with a decent amount of people and at any given moment will have 5-10 people streaming from it. I'm using a AMD threadripper processor for the server, and I have a simple setup with two pairs of 10TB drives in raid1.

Currently I know very little about what a NAS is capable of, and I'm making this thread to figure out if the plan I have in mind is feasible. I would like to keep my plex server and web servers running on the linux machine I have, but have the data come from a separate NAS. I understand that AMD processors do not work for NAS too well so that way I could keep the cost of the NAS down. I have an Intel i7-6700k processor laying around from my last PC upgrade that I could use, though I'm sure its overkill for this.

With a NAS, is it possible to have the NAS drives mounted/accessible on both the linux server and my windows desktop?

 

[danb35]

With a NAS, is it possible to have the NAS drives mounted/accessible on both the linux server and my windows desktop?

Of course it is. Set up as many shares as you want, and mount them on whatever clients work for you.

 

[diedrichg]

When I first started with FeeeNAS I thought I could cheap out and use consumer-grade hardware. Within a week I was getting corrupted files. Being a family file server this was unacceptable. I switched to a Supermicro motherboard, supported CPU, supported RAM and everything has been going great for 6 years! Where I was trying to save money with the consumer hardware I wound up spending well over the budget having to do it properly.

Lesson learned. Don't cheap out, spend a few extra dollars at the beginning.

Since you will simply be storing your Plex media rather than serving it, if you want to save some money on a processor you could go with a supported Pentium or i3 (I haven't checked to see if their latest gen Pentiums or i3s have ECC support though). Disclosure; I had a Pentium (still have it to sell) that was working great and I recently upgraded to a Xeon E3. I'm not sorry I did that upgrade path but in hindsight I should have just gone with the Xeon.

Yes, you can make Windows (SMB) shares that will be easily accessible by Linux, Windows, macOS.

There are some very important guides on this forum for hardware suggestions. You also need to read the one about the ZFS pools.

 

[Dice]

Hope you get onboard :)
Since you wont migrate plex to FreeNAS, there is a lot less strict requirements for the build.

Anything you'll read about what hardware you'll need to support Plex on these forums typically relate to running Plex on FN.
Since you won't need to do transcoding on the fly, you'll be happy with the low end CPU power system.

I'd strongly suggest you do get a SuperMicro board, simply because we've tons of positivt user experience with these.
For CPU, get one that supports ECC (double check Intel ARK page). Start out with a 16GB stick of ECC RAM.
You can forget about SLOGs, or "write cache" at this point.
A L2ARC or "read cache" might prove to be useful for your load, in case users tend to gravitate to certain files. Bumping RAM to 64GB would allow for a decent sized L2ARC to potentially do magic for you down the line.
The typical practice is to start out small, try, test for <weeks> (in order for caches to saturate and ZFS really get the hang about what you are doing). A 2-3 day evaulation "torture testing" will typically not impress, nor be representative of the performance once ZFS settles in.

My initial migration onto ZFS-experience with freenas a few years ago was not particularly pleasant. I regarded the migration process as somewhat of a evaluation torture test. Indeed, I was not happy at all. However... a week down the line, once migration was done and workloads had normalized, I've never ever since been the slightest unhappy with the performance.

Good luck!

 

[Apollo]

@tylerpnn, I am running Freenas on Threadripper 1900X and it is running great.
For Data storage a G4600 series works great and equipped with Supermicro board there would be no partitcular issues.