After months of lurking, learning, reading, I think I am ready for my first build. What do you guys think.

[Ghost_InThe_Machine]

Hi guys, I have been lurking through this community and the FReeNAS forums for a while now. I read as many articles as I can, including the amazing guide by Cyberjock. I also played around with installing FreeNAS on an old computer and in a virtual machine. I by no means have the experience most of you have with FreeNAS, but I think it is time to start the build.
I have around 25TB of DATA in various places and was initially looking to consolidate that on a regular Windows build. I had already purchased the drives (6 X 8TB Toshiba N300 NAS) This was done before my knowledge of FreeNAS and ZFS. A friend asked me to look it up and I have been reading a lot of articles, forums and reddit posts pertaining to it.
With your assistance and help, below are the considerations I have for the rest of the hardware from the build. My budget is $1500 (Not including the hard drives as I already have those)
FreeNas Setup is predominantly for:
1. Windows CIFS - file share.
2. I will have one zpool (RAIDZ2 - So 32TB available)
3. Will be running backups - Have to figure out the best way to do this.

1. Mother board. - I read the hardware guide and while the board I am looking at (Gigabyte C246-WU4 ) was not listed, I like this board for a number of reasons, including it ticking most of the boxes on the hardware guide.

It has Dual Intel GB nics. It support ECC memory (UP to 128GB - Although the CPU chosen only supports up to 64GB) and has 10 SATA ports.

1. CPU - Intel - Xeon E3-1275 V6. I chose this CPU as it is both compatible with the board and support ECC
2. RAM- (2) Micron 32 GB ECC Memory
3. Boot Device - 2 X Intel SSD 545s Series (128gb) - These will be mirrored and be boot drives.
4. Case - Not to sure on the case, might change it.
5. Power Supply - 750 Watt should be more than enough.
6. CPU Cooler - I have used these before and really love the performance.

I will also be adding some fans to cool the hard drives.
Please let me know if there is a better way to do this, if I am missing anything or if you foresee a reason for this to not work? Any contribution\criticism is welcome. I can only learn from it.
Thank you in advance.

 

[tfran1990]

https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/specific-build-components-list-up-to-32gb-ram.109/

Cant go wrong with the build guides.
many new users pick a board because it has 10 or 8 sata ports for lots of discs.(I did the same thing at first) Thats not a good idea. Best thing to do is pick a board that many other people have used or are using and have not had any problems with. Then stuff it with a lot of ram. To get around not having alot of sata ports is to use a HBA, there cheap and it makes it easy to focus on other options.

 

[Jessep]

Going with an edge case MB you can run into problems and since no one else has one we likely won't be able to help. We suggest the stuff we do because it works.
Are you planning bare metal or virtualised?
Backups I would suggest Veeam.

 

[Ghost_InThe_Machine]

Hi all, Thank you for the input and I do believe I will take your advice and go for a board that is used more widely.
I am currently looking at: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/specific-build-components-list-up-to-32gb-ram.109/ as recommended by tfran1990.
Will update with new configuration in a few minutes.

 

[Heracles]

Hi Ghost,

Mirrored 128G SSDs for boot is overkill. You are free to do as much overkill as you wish, but know that there is some room to cut there if you need to. Usually, SSDs are reliable enough for not to be mirrored and 32G is already more than needed.

Here, I have a pair of USB sticks that are mirrored and 8G. Mirrored because USB sticks are not as resistant as SSDs and 8G is enough.

As for backups, remember that even FreeNAS can suffer incidents and loose its data. I recommend you follow the rule for 3 copies. That rule says that every data must exist in at least 3 different and independent copies. Local snapshots are not one of these copies.

Here, my clients have the first copy sync in their end devices using the Nextcloud app.
Second copy is the one hosted in my main FreeNAS. ZFS, local snapshots and versioning/undelete by Nextcloud help make that copy very robust.
Third copy is on the DR server, sent by ZFS replication to a server that is hundreds of KMs away. That is replicated with everything from the second copy, so Nextcloud's versioning and undelete can be restored there if needed.

As such, not a single incident, either physical or logical, can affect all of these copies at once. Remember that a single logical incident can damage two copies if it happen inside the replication mechanism between two copies. Also, a single physical incident can damage multiple copies if they are all on the same site.

Technically, even my setup does not perfectly respect the rule because none of these copies is completely offline. I chose to accept that residual risk...

Have fun designing your setup

 

[Ghost_InThe_Machine]

Going with an edge case MB you can run into problems and since no one else has one we likely won't be able to help. We suggest the stuff we do because it works.
Are you planning bare metal or virtualised?
Backups I would suggest Veeam.

Hi Jessep and thank you for your reply,
I was looking at baremetal. Thanks for your suggestion with the backup, will look at it.

 

[tfran1990]

Hi all, Thank you for the input and I do believe I will take your advice and go for a board that is used more widely.
I am currently looking at: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/specific-build-components-list-up-to-32gb-ram.109/ as recommended by tfran1990.
Will update with new configuration in a few minutes.

Dont know how many sata slots are on the board but i strongly recommend ordering a host bus adapter for your drives. it will give you possible expansion for the future, combine with an expander.