Consolidating old FreeNAS machines and building the SUPER-NAS box

[mwoods98]

Greetings,

I have a few FreeNAS boxes around the house that I would like to move into one main "super" box. The idea would be to copy over all of the content from the other machines to this one and to have it be the main and only FNAS box.

I have a few questions and if anyone also has some advice I would be happy to hear it.

1) What is the best recommended way to transfer content from one FNAS box to another one.

2) I am considering building this box. I would like to try to build this as inexpensive as possible. I would like to use SATA drives and I think the sweet spot is about 2TB drives. I think I would like to have at least 3.

3) Any suggestions on parts etc would be helpful This is going to go from the bottom up.

4) I have been looking into a thread to ad pyTivo to an FNas box. This would help me serve any video content to my tivos in the house. So the box would need to be beefy enough to trans-code the video.

If anyone else has a guide or any suggestions they can link me to it will be helpful.

TIA,

 

[marcusmarcus]

3) Are you more interested in performance or energy savings?
I ask because I was more interested in energy saving so I got a GIGABYTE GA-D525TUD Motherboard that has a Intel Atom D525 1.8Ghz. Performance wise, it is plenty for what I need but not blazing fast transfer speeds. It only supports 4GB RAM Max. ZFS is fairly memory intensive so 8GB probably would improve speed but I was limited by the motherboard. AMD offers low energy CPUs as well and the ASUS E35M1-M PRO motherboard can support 8GB RAM Max so that might be nice choice. Over all I am happy with the performance of my machine.
If your more interested in performance, an intel i3 or i5 or an AMD Phenom II I'm sure would be spectacular for transfer speeds.

 

[matthewowen01]

you can look into the Intel Core i3-2100T, very modern and only 35 Watts.

thinking about that for my next build.

 

[mwoods98]

Thanks for your reply. I think that horse power may be the key here. The Box should be strong enough to transfer and re-encode a file on the fly. For Ex: I here is the specs of the machine in which I am running streambaby: (http://code.google.com/p/streambaby/)

Summary
Operating System
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 42 °C
Manchester 90nm Technology
RAM
3.00 GB Single-Channel DDR @ 163MHz (2.5-3-3-7)
Motherboard
ASUSTek Computer INC. A8V-E SE (Socket 939) 40 °C
Hard Drives
977GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FBYS-02A6B0 ATA Device (SATA) 38 °C
977GB Western Digital WDC WD10EADS-00M2B0 ATA Device (SATA) 40 °C



Transfer speeds are good but not primary.

Thanks, Please keep the suggestions coming.