Will it FreeNas and Plex?

Joined
Oct 18, 2018
Messages
969
How many of these? If you're using just 1 I'm not sure FreeNAS is really an ideal solution. FreeNAS is about more than just being a NAS; it is about data integrity. It cannot provide that to you with data stored on a single drive and so you may perhaps find the effort involved in setting up and maintaining a FreeNAS machine not giving you the full rewards.

Do with the largest modules of memory your motherboard and cpu can handle and buy as many as you can afford; doing so will improve your read performance quite a bit.

This is not ideal but I understand you may have already owned it? Since you didn't purchase it many of the drawbacks of gamer oriented boards don't apply here (paying for features such as audio support, rgb, etc that servers don't care about). What I do want to mention is the lack of ECC and the NIC on that board.

ECC memory protects your data from corruption due to faulty memory. Without it you could end up with a system that corrupts some of your data due to bad memory. It is worth doing a bit of research on this topic for yourself so you know the risks. It isn't an absolute "don't ever do this or the FreeNAS gods will smite you" so much as a "just understand the risks" sort of thing.

If experience issues with network connectivity your onboard Realtek® GbE LAN chip (10/100/1000 Mbit) may be the culprit; if you have issues consider adding a genuine intel NIC via a pcie slot.
Because SSDs are so cheap these days and way more reliable many folks are opting to boot from SSDs rather than USB. You certainly can use USB if you choose to.
 

boyese

Cadet
Joined
Dec 2, 2019
Messages
6
For now it will be 1 x 8TB drive - I will look at getting another one later on next year. The motherboard cost me £20 so if i see any issues I'll try a differnet NIC. Thanks for the advice.
 

rvassar

Guru
Joined
May 2, 2018
Messages
971
For now it will be 1 x 8TB drive - I will look at getting another one later on next year. The motherboard cost me £20 so if i see any issues I'll try a differnet NIC. Thanks for the advice.

Your single 8Tb disk is a single point of failure. It dies, your data is gone.

One of the things FreeNAS does is build pools of storage. If I take four 4Tb drives, and build a RAIDz2 pool, I get roughly the same 8Tb of storage, but I can suffer two disk failures and stay up and online. This is one of the key features of FreeNAS. Furthermore, you can even scavenge and reuse old disks and build pools from mixed scrap disks that will have better data integrity than you'll have with your one 8Tb drive.

Consider, refurbished white label 2 & 3 Tb disks are cheap on Amazon.
 

tomahawkeer

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 16, 2019
Messages
12
I don't think freenas is right for you. You might want to consider a synology, qnap or drobo.
 

CP Waite

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 4, 2016
Messages
19
I don't see why FreeNAS is the wrong choice here, as long as the OP likes tinkering. But going through the effort of setting up FreeNAS and only using one drive is totally missing the point. You're better off creating a zpool with that 8tb and whatever other drive you can scrap together (if you can afford another 8th drive use that, or get a 2/4/6 drive for cheap) and plug along with the smaller capacity. When you're able to afford the matching 8th drive, you can swap the smaller drive for that, initialize it in FreeNAS and then grow the pool once the data has replicated.

I did something similar, repurposed a bunch of my brother's old gaming hardware to build mine. some Gigabyte gaming mobo, a 3rd gen Intel i5 CPU, and 16gb of ram. Then I just chucked in the 6 or so random drives I had lying around, making sure to pair the same sized drives where possible. I had quite of few of my drives die nearly immediately (had a pair of those factory defective 1.5tb Seagates that decided to up and die within 2 months of bringing them online. I started out with maybe 3tb of aggregate capacity split across 3 mirrored drive pairs. Since then I've more than doubled that as I've been able to replace drives with larger, new units. Given my experience, I'm leery of refurbed and used drives, but I suppose others have had better luck.

Anyway, your equipment seems perfectly fine, however if your use case doesn't require redundancy of multiple drives, then FreeNAS is sorta overkill, part of the point is multiple drives, and redundancy, not just to serve as a NAS.
 

CP Waite

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 4, 2016
Messages
19
Also, to add: I use my FreeNAS as a TimeMachine backup target and general NAS use, but the main use is as a Plex Server. Its been totally awesome and absolutely zero major issues aside from a few issues caused by myself.
 
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