BUILD Conservative X10SLL-F Build, have I covered my bases?

[lolwutbucket]

Hello FreeNAS Community!

After reading through as many posts & stickies I possibly could I believe I am ready to purchase a build for home use to install on bare-metal. I have been virtualizing FreeNAS on an ESXi machine with a passed-through M1015 HBA card and it has been a great experience... so time to get serious!

My foremost attempt here is to heed the warnings I see EVERYWHERE by the veterans (it must get frustrating), so my goal here is simplicity, stability, and not cutting any corners. Hopefully I've got it right so here we go:

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/vxKkTH
Intel Core i3-4150 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor
Supermicro X10SLL-F Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
QTY 4: Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
QTY 2: SanDisk Ultra Fit 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive SDCZ43-016G-G46

Use Case:

• RAID-Z1 VDev
  
• CIFS share to workstations, one of several backup locations for photos & documents
  
• Plex media transcoding

Notes/Questions:

• It's my understanding that the onboard SATA ports will suffice for hard disk connectivity, my M1015 HBA card will be of no use for a 4 HDD system.
• The USB Flash drives should be plugged into USB 2.0 ports, the 3.0 drivers are unstable in OpenBSD?
• Yes, I will get a UPS, I haven't chosen one yet.
• I have a 700W power supply being shipped to me from a friend pulled out of a SuperMicro chassis, if it doesn't work out I'll purchase one Gold rated.
• Will this machine be powerful enough to transcode media through Plex? My exposure is minimal, I have been using a Raspberry Pi on OSMC and it cannot handle the high quality media (no surprise).
• I would like to set up a Datastore to serve as a backup directory for a Bacula VM, I have read that using NFS may require a ZIL, should I be mounting FreeNAS with Samba on a Linux server?
• I've chosen 4 x WD Red trying to appease the FreeNAS criteria, occasionally I have read that using a mix of WD Green or Blues will work, am I choosing correctly?

Trying to keep it simple, I hope I didn't ask any of those painfully obvious questions that reoccur every other day for those who frequent the forums!

 

[Jailer]

It's my understanding that the onboard SATA ports will suffice for hard disk connectivity, my M1015 HBA card will be of no use for a 4 HDD system.

Correct

The USB Flash drives should be plugged into USB 2.0 ports, the 3.0 drivers are unstable in OpenBSD?

No longer an issue since 9.10 was introduced. And FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD not OpenBSD. ;)

Yes, I will get a UPS, I haven't chosen one yet.

Good call.

I have a 700W power supply being shipped to me from a friend pulled out of a SuperMicro chassis, if it doesn't work out I'll purchase one Gold rated.

Should be more than enough for your needs.

Will this machine be powerful enough to transcode media through Plex?

Yes

My exposure is minimal, I have been using a Raspberry Pi on OSMC and it cannot handle the high quality media (no surprise).

Likely due to bitrate limitations of what the Pi can handle.

I would like to set up a Datastore to serve as a backup directory for a Bacula VM, I have read that using NFS may require a ZIL, should I be mounting FreeNAS with Samba on a Linux server?

No clue, someone who knows more on this will have to comment.

I've chosen 4 x WD Red trying to appease the FreeNAS criteria, occasionally I have read that using a mix of WD Green or Blues will work, am I choosing correctly?

Choice of drives is strictly a personal judgement call although some seem to choose based on emotions. Just ask around about Seagates and you'll see what I mean. Your choice in drives is a sound one and as long as it meets your storage/redundancy needs it should serve you well.

 

[lolwutbucket]

Thank you! My bad with the fudge of FreeBSD/OpenBSD

Edit: And I'm going to stick with the WD Reds, I will play on the safe side

 

[Spearfoot]

Hello FreeNAS Community!

Hello! Welcome aboard!

Your hardware choices look good. I did a little research to make sure you'd selected ECC memory and that your CPU supports it.

QTY 4: Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Use Case:

• RAID-Z1 VDev
• I've chosen 4 x WD Red trying to appease the FreeNAS criteria, occasionally I have read that using a mix of WD Green or Blues will work, am I choosing correctly?

Trying to keep it simple, I hope I didn't ask any of those painfully obvious questions that reoccur every other day for those who frequent the forums!

Yes, WD Reds are a good choice, are used by many here on the forum, and there is no problem with using identical drives. Note that some members advise obtaining drives from multiple sources to avoid having all of the drives come from the same batch.

However... RAIDZ1 is not recommended for larger drives like you've chosen:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-primer.38927/

"When considering the number of disks to use per vdev, consider the size of the disks and the amount of time required for resilvering, which is the process of rebuilding the vdev. The larger the size of the vdev, the longer the resilvering time. When replacing a disk in a RAIDZ*, it is possible that another disk will fail before the resilvering process completes. If the number of failed disks exceeds the number allowed per vdev for the type of RAIDZ, the data in the pool will be lost. For this reason, RAIDZ1 is not recommended for drives over 1 TB in size."

 

[lolwutbucket]

I am simultaneously working on a different project to back up any critical files to an offsite location. I also currently have essential data on mirrored NTFS drives in my local machine. This will be three copies of data in 1.5 different locations.
The majority of data on this NAS will be completely expendable multimedia. I opted to lean on the overall size versus redundancy when making my choice. Considering my situation, I should be fine? I'm not trying to swim upstream on this one, I promise I won't come crying when I have total data loss, I've seen it and know the consequences!

Edit: Almost forgot, I also ~bi-annually sync my document/photo directories to a HDD I keep detached in a closet.

 

[Jailer]

As long as you are comfortable with the redundancy you have chosen and the risks associated with it then go for it.

 

[lolwutbucket]

I'm going to purchase all the parts today, sourcing the drives from a few locations.

Once I've got everything put together I'll check the performance metrics on mounting the share for use with Bacula and do some more in-depth research. Thanks for all the support everyone, I feel confident moving forward!

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I've chosen 4 x WD Red trying to appease the FreeNAS criteria, occasionally I have read that using a mix of WD Green or Blues will work, am I choosing correctly?

Any drive will work, but NAS drives will fail more gracefully (won't stall the whole system retrying a failed read), plus you won't have any issues if you need to return a drive that you used 24x7 but was designed for 8x5.