Feedback on Hardware Selection

[CraftyCrafty]

Hello everyone!

I am excited to join the FreeNAS community and would love some feedback on an idea for a server upgrade. I build my first FreeNAS box a couple of months ago and have run into some problems- I didn't do my homework before taking the plunge. I have realized that now and want to get a proper setup to ensure the safety of my data and future reliability. My current box has two 3tb drives in a mirrored ZFS pool. I had a drive fail a couple of weeks ago, replaced and resilvered. The experience of having all my data intact thanks to FreeNAS has inspired me to put some time and work into getting a decent server.

After reading many of the build guides here, I've located a server I would like some community feedback on: an IBM/Lenovo RD240 2U Rack Server with a Quad Core 2.26Ghz Xeon Processor and 16GB of Memory. The system was a pull from a datacenter and it priced at ~$150 w/o drives.

I was reading over the datasheet on this system and am concerned about the SAS/SATA backplane. I've read that it is ideal for FreeNAS and ZFS to be able to see and address each drive individually.. I am unsure if this will be possible with this system. Here is the datasheet and I am hoping someone can help me decide if this would be a good fit for me.

http://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/content/pdf/servers/RD240_DataSheet.pdf

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post and provide your opinions!

 

[cyberjock]

Well, notice the OSes supported doesn't say FreeBSD. That's often an indicator that FreeBSD won't run. It's not a 100% guarantee, but when people buy a pre-built system from a manufacturer and have problems getting it to even post, it never says FreeBSD is supported.

As for the SATA/SAS there's no way to know as Lenovo doesn't seem to want to talk about their secret sauce hardware. This could mean they use proprietary custom designed hardware(see above warning about FreeBSD again...) and it's not exactly the same as other COTS equivalents.

So.... it's a risk. It might or might not work. If you want to buy me one I'll give you a solid yes/no answer. :)