USB 3 or 2

[Ghola]

Hi Guys

New to this but reading up on things last few days and forming my plans

Can you advise if it is better for me to buy a USB 3.0 PCI card for this little SFF PC (PDF Spec attached) I will be using for my Flashdrives or stick with the USb 2.0 on the back. i guess it it boils down internal bottlenecks BUT I am sure the 3.0 will be faster in a PCI-E slot, etc than a USB2 on the back

I have 8GB RAM & Plenty of HDDs ready and ordering a 32GB USB stick for Freenas Friday and a smaller one to install from. The Add on cards are so cheap

I work in the IT industry and get loads of these RP5700's all the time (5 spare at work atm!)

Thanks for your help
Steve

 

[diedrichg]

1. Go to the Hardware section and read the sticky regarding recommended hardware - ECC is a must for data integrity.

2. USB 3.0 is not enabled in FreeNAS, stick with (2) USB 2.0 name-brand USB thumb drives on the ports that are on the motherboard. Speed is not a factor. If you are building for clients, then go with a pair of SATADOMs with the intention of longevity for the boot devices.

 

[Ghola]

thanks for the reply so good job I asked. Will stick that in my main PC then I guess:p

I cant afford ECC memory and this is just for home use, NAS/Media Streaming and such but thank you for the hint. I did read that bit of the docs but di not get as far as USB3;)

edit, just read also that the PCI am using cant use ECC RAM AFTER i find some cheap on Ebay, not so expensive after all

 

[SweetAndLow]

I suspect your experience with FreeNAS on this hardware will be poor. The hardware is far from the recommendations and not having ecc memory and supporting parts is a deal breaker in my book. Good luck and report back on if it works or not.

 

[Ghola]

i wholeheartedly agree, I am a complete noob on most of this:). I have kept to the min spec of 8GB RAM but not ECC, if I can find a Mobo that supports ECC then I may do that on next build, this will be practice I guess, I home project so I dont have to keep my loud Main PC on for Streaming to the TV.

I saw the ECC RAm on Ebay for a decent price so that encouraged me but keeping spend to a minimum atm. if I can find a decent 2nd ECC Mobo with a processor then I will jump into that but also need to get something up and running quickly. But, if it all goes wrong then fair enough

 

[SweetAndLow]

Awesome! Glad you did some reading. I was just double checking, we get lots of people posting saying xxx doesn't work or is slow. They then get asked about hardware and they are running a 7 year old amd box with 2gb of memory. Then get upset because it can't run on their hardware.

 

[Ghola]

yeah, i tried this about a year ago, I consider myself pretty PC literate (I stage/build EPOS systems at work and am a IT Project Manager) but got persmission errors when i tried to moved files on to the CIFS/Windows folders that I saw on my main PC then gave up but have vowed to try it again. So had a good read of the 9.3 specs the other night (need to finish them). read about L2ARC/Caches, how ZFS work (was well impresssed by that, I work for Oracle) . 9.3 seems easier as it has been updated with a wizard or somthing so I am hopin that will not give me the problem I first had

I know to have min 8GB ram now (this PC is limted to 8GB), 2 USB sticks, 1 to install from, 1 to install too (biggest I can afford so going for 16/32GB pen drive to run it off of. got a standard 1TB Sata HDD to put in and a plethora of spare HDDs about to add in but limted to 3 drive bays on this

With anything PC based i am always conscious of bottlenecks and speeds and making if can go as fast as I can, hence my uSB3 question

this is effectively my dry practice run to learn how to do it then after that will spend a bit of money, maybe get a 2nd hand server or something, try RAID or whatever

edit: oh, and the GF wants one, so if I get it right then I can build her one too

 

[sef]

If your primary concern is low cost, then I recommend you go with a low-cost solution -- there are a bunch of 1-2 disk NAS devices out there (e.g., ).

The only reason to cheap out when building a FreeNAS box is out of experimentation, when you are trying to decide if it's something you want to actually invest in.

 

[Z300M]

1. Go to the Hardware section and read the sticky regarding recommended hardware - ECC is a must for data integrity.

2. USB 3.0 is not enabled in FreeNAS, stick with (2) USB 2.0 name-brand USB thumb drives on the ports that are on the motherboard. Speed is not a factor. If you are building for clients, then go with a pair of SATADOMs with the intention of longevity for the boot devices.

Just as one example, I tried mirrored 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB 2.0 thumb drives for a while, but one or other of them kept failing despite having been tested error-free on another machine. I am now using the 16GB versions of those same drives, and all seems to be well.