What is appropriate for my needs

[MJN]

I stream music and movies (much high rez) to PC's and movie players at home. Typically only 1 user but I could conceive of 2 movies at a time by different users. I have about 7 TB of stuff and it might grow over time.

As a "demonstration of concept" project, I managed to take an old (5 years at least) 2.8 MHz Pentium 1 GB memory (2GB max), 40 GB PATA drive and make into FREENAS server with UFS. I am able to steam up to 2 movies and High rez music, simultaneously, without hiccough. If I am reading graphs correctly, speed is 5 MB, sec

I have read re: ZFS, RAID,etc. Not sure I understand all ramifications.

All of my data is backed up. Any downtime is not a life altering event to me, just irritating - ie this stuff is not "mission critical" or my business - it's just entertainment.

Trying to look to the future and would prefer to do this set up once, not many times. It would be nice I suppose to just be told a disk is going and just put one in and move on...

Prefer to save money but have ZERO desire to waste money if no advantage to me.

So, should I

1) Get a bunch of drives to allow enough space, get a SATA card, use UFS and move on

OR

2) Buy a new motherboard that allows more memory, has built in SATA, etc and do the ZFS thing.

Thanks

All advice gratefully accepted


Thanks in advance

Robert A. Harris, Jr., M.D., F.A.C.P.

 

[louisk]

I would suggest that you go with option 2. You can get a relatively cheap c2d board, I'd make sure it supports at least 4G RAM and sounds like you'll need a number of SATA ports.
If you wish to use RAIDZ, you'll need (using 2T as a spindle), a minimum of 5 spindles (RAIDZ is similar to RAID5)
If you wish to use RAIDZ2, you'll need (using 2T as a spindle), a minimum of 6 spindles (RAIDZ2 is similar to RAID6)
If you wish to use mirrors, you'll need (using 2T as a spindle), a minimum of 8 spindles (mirrors in the same pool are similar to RAID10)

 

[ProtoSD]

I agree with Louis, option one is an invitation to doing things more than once and an opportunity for problems.