BUILD Advice and Suggestions on a Freenas build

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Shirley Rougely

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Hello all, I plan on saving up for a freenas build but i'm not sure if the build I came up with is a good one. I plan on using it for storing music, tv shows and so on and maybe streaming content if possible. I've currently have all my important files (over 17gb of songs and mixes for example), on a Seagate Free Agent Go external hard drive (500gb) I bought back in 2010. I've never had a problem with it but I'd like to move my files to something a bit more secure just in case age starts to catch up with it.
Here's the build I came up with:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-4150 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor ($93.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock E3C224D2I Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard ($169.99 @ Mwave)
Memory: Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($151.94 @ Adorama)
Storage: Western Digital Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($244.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($244.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($244.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($244.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: Corsair RM 450W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $1545.86
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-05-19 14:53 EDT-0400


If anyone has any suggestions or improvements that could be made to the build, feel free to post a response as i'm still learning about freenas and any advice is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
 
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How do you plan on arranging the hard drives? RaidZ2? What are your storage needs? How many TBs of space would you like to end up with?

Seasonic is a favorite power supply of must people on the forum. They seem to have good luck with them.

Look at a UPS as well. A server should have the chance to shutdown properly.

One last thing. Use 2 good USB drives for your boot device. You can mirror them for cheap insurance.
 

Ericloewe

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If you'll be using a Node 804, there really is no reason to get a motherboard limited to 16GB of RAM. Get a Supermicro X10, for instance.
 

Shirley Rougely

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My storage needs are storing my music, tv shows, documents and other files i've collected over the years and possibly steaming them like a HTPC. I want to start off with 4 6tb western digital red drives (24 tb total) and then buy another 4 in the future to make a grand total of 48 tb (the maximum amount of 3.5 inch hard drive on the fractal design node 804 is 8 and two 2.5 inch drives). I'm not sure what raid to run them on, what would you suggest? I've heard of seasonic but they're really expensive (the lowest new price i've seen on sites was $89.00 non-modular power supply) and i'm looking for modular since the case i plan to buy is micro atx/mini itx. I have a ups in mind on getting here's the link to that: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FBK3QK/?tag=ozlp-20.

Also do you think that motherboard could hold more drives or would I have to look for another one in order to have 8 hard drives? Which one would you recommend for an itx or micro atx build? Thanks for your response.
 
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Well let's look at the hard drive side of things a minute. If the data is important to you then a RAIDZ2 would be recommended. At that point 2 drives are for parity. After ZFS overhead and the difference in TiB and TB, you'd be looking at about 9-9.5 TB, gI've or take a little.

Check out this calculator to play around with the numbers more.
 

Shirley Rougely

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Well let's look at the hard drive side of things a minute. If the data is important to you then a RAIDZ2 would be recommended. At that point 2 drives are for parity. After ZFS overhead and the difference in TiB and TB, you'd be looking at about 9-9.5 TB, gI've or take a little.

Check out this calculator to play around with the numbers more.

I used that calculator with RAIDZ2 and added the 8 drives at 6 tb each and got a total of 48 tb of raw storage and 32.7 tb of usable storage and for the 4 drives at 6 tb each totaled to 24 tb of raw storage and 10.9 tb for usable storage. That'll be more than enough for my music, files and a few tv shows I guess. I have one more question; could i stream my music and tv shows in RAIDZ2 or would I have to choose another RAID for that?
 
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You loss a little more space due to overhead, but it appears to be enough for you all the same. Like you said, you can add 4 more drives later. I've built 2 FreeNAS servers with 804s and like them a lot.

Yes, you can streaming from RAIDZ2 just fine. It is the file system. Just depends on how you're going to stream it. Samba, etc...
 
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Look in he's signature for his X10 hardware recommendation FAQ.
 

Shirley Rougely

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You loss a little more space due to overhead, but it appears to be enough for you all the same. Like you said, you can add 4 more drives later. I've built 2 FreeNAS servers with 804s and like them a lot.

Yes, you can streaming from RAIDZ2 just fine. It is the file system. Just depends on how you're going to stream it. Samba, etc...

I usually use VLC media player for watching shows and listening to music so i'm gonna look and see if there's a VLC plugin. Thanks again for the help I really do appreciate it.
 

Ericloewe

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I usually use VLC media player for watching shows and listening to music so i'm gonna look and see if there's a VLC plugin. Thanks again for the help I really do appreciate it.
You don't need a plugin, you can just directly access the files.
 
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I usually use VLC media player for watching shows and listening to music so i'm gonna look and see if there's a VLC plugin. Thanks again for the help I really do appreciate it.
Your welcome! Hope you enjoy your stay here. There is a good group of very knowledgeable people around here. I don't happen to be one of them though. :D I'm still learning.
 

Shirley Rougely

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You don't need a plugin, you can just directly access the files.

So would I need to just download VLC player to my freenas or does freenas has its own media player? If I was to go with the asrock board I have in my parts list and wanted to add 4 more drives to the four other drives and there's only 6 sata ports, (4 sata 6 and 2 sata 3), how would I be able to add them? Would I need some kind of adapter or splitter in order to add extra drives?

And if I needed to get another motherboard that supports 8 or more hard drives, could you suggest some as the only drive I was able to find with 8 sata ports was this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821 but the 8 ports are only sata 3 and the western digital drives are sata 6 and I think it might affect speed and performance. Sorry for the ton of questions but I'm trying to make sure I know everything is going to be compatible with each other before spending a lot of money on a nas.
 

pirateghost

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So would I need to just download VLC player to my freenas or does freenas has its own media player? If I was to go with the asrock board I have in my parts list and wanted to add 4 more drives to the four other drives and there's only 6 sata ports, (4 sata 6 and 2 sata 3), how would I be able to add them? Would I need some kind of adapter or splitter in order to add extra drives?

And if I needed to get another motherboard that supports 8 or more hard drives, could you suggest some as the only drive I was able to find with 8 sata ports was this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821 but the 8 ports are only sata 3 and the western digital drives are sata 6 and I think it might affect speed and performance. Sorry for the ton of questions but I'm trying to make sure I know everything is going to be compatible with each other before spending a lot of money on a nas.
FreeNAS runs headless. There is no desktop GUI. As such, there is no media player.

You run VLC on your desktop/laptop, and browse to the path where your files are and play them. That's it.

Even better is using Plex Media Server plugin and using a Plex client on your desktop/laptop/mobile device.
 

marbus90

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Personally I'd maybe go with the following build:

LianLi PC-Q26, Seasonic G-450, ASrock E3C224D4I-14S, Xeon E3-1220 v3 or E3-1241 v3, 1-2 CT2KIT102472BD160B kits, 4x LianLi BP2SATA (1 included) for enabling hotswap on 2 bays each

This allows you to use 5disk z2 vdevs which are a bit more efficient $/TB wise, also this combination is far smaller than the Node 804 (which is a HUGE battleship, even next to mATX/ATX towers).
 

Shirley Rougely

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Personally I'd maybe go with the following build:

LianLi PC-Q26, Seasonic G-450, ASrock E3C224D4I-14S, Xeon E3-1220 v3 or E3-1241 v3, 1-2 CT2KIT102472BD160B kits, 4x LianLi BP2SATA (1 included) for enabling hotswap on 2 bays each

This allows you to use 5disk z2 vdevs which are a bit more efficient $/TB wise, also this combination is far smaller than the Node 804 (which is a HUGE battleship, even next to mATX/ATX towers).

I don't think i'll need a xeon as i'm just going to be using the nas for storing my files, streaming music and and tv shows from another computer (if possible), and not really doing anything too intensive to need such an expensive cpu. Thanks for taking the time to reply I do appreciate it.
 

Shirley Rougely

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I will suggest for instance to go with a mATX (that one that Ericloewe comment, supermicro x10), so you can go for 32 GB (is a good idea having many memory as you can, start with 16 and upgrade if you need it, maybe some future proof?) and this case

http://www.bitfenix.com/global/en/products/chassis/phenom-micro-atx/

kind regards.

Thanks for taking the time to reply I appreciate it, i'm definitely going to go with a small form factor case (Fractal Design Node 804), but im not sure on which supermicro board to go with as eric wasn't specific on which board to pick, just saying to pick a supermicro board but I guess i'll have to figure it out myself.
 

Shirley Rougely

Dabbler
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Mar 9, 2015
Messages
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I think i'm going to enroll in a class on freenas and study some more to get a better understanding of things before I start buying parts as all of this is still a bit confusing. I just wanted to thank everyone who took the time to reply with suggestions and advice. Thanks again for the help it was much appreciated.
 
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