I am putting together a Freenas box with some hardware I have around and have collected from previous projects. Ideally, this will morph into a more permanent build for backup storage and streaming at home.
Current specs from existing hardware are:
Intel i7 4790K cpu
MSI G87 GD65 Gaming mobo
16gb non-ecc ram
Thermaltake Smart700 80+ power supply
Corsair H80i liquid cooling
4x Seagate Barracuda 2TB hard drives
Patriot 16gig thumb drive (boot)
Samsung PM851 SSD 120gig (possible boot drive or cache drive?)
Mid-tower case with plenty of cooling (forgot the brand)
My plan is to build this to use mostly as a media streaming server for the umpteen devices in my house and familiarize myself with different ways to configure and use Freenas (Plex server, etc.) and to eventually move these hard drives to my old Buffalo NAS and install 5 or 6 8TB drives in this case for mixed media backup/streaming and possibly some work file backup (might use the Buffalo NAS for this, not sure yet.)
Would this hardware setup work for my needs for the next few years? Also, would I be better off using the small SSD as a boot device over the thumb drive? Not sure I'd see much if any performance gain with it as a cache drive and from what I've read it might actually slow the system down somewhat. Any input would be helpful.
Current specs from existing hardware are:
Intel i7 4790K cpu
MSI G87 GD65 Gaming mobo
16gb non-ecc ram
Thermaltake Smart700 80+ power supply
Corsair H80i liquid cooling
4x Seagate Barracuda 2TB hard drives
Patriot 16gig thumb drive (boot)
Samsung PM851 SSD 120gig (possible boot drive or cache drive?)
Mid-tower case with plenty of cooling (forgot the brand)
My plan is to build this to use mostly as a media streaming server for the umpteen devices in my house and familiarize myself with different ways to configure and use Freenas (Plex server, etc.) and to eventually move these hard drives to my old Buffalo NAS and install 5 or 6 8TB drives in this case for mixed media backup/streaming and possibly some work file backup (might use the Buffalo NAS for this, not sure yet.)
Would this hardware setup work for my needs for the next few years? Also, would I be better off using the small SSD as a boot device over the thumb drive? Not sure I'd see much if any performance gain with it as a cache drive and from what I've read it might actually slow the system down somewhat. Any input would be helpful.