First build - Budget FreeNAS for home

[maebo]

I have been lurking and reading, but this is my first post on this forum. I have ordered parts and plan to start assembling and testing components tonight. This build is loosely based on Brian Moses' 2017 EconoNAS blog post. I want a cheap, small-footprint, low-power-use, simple file server to manage backups and store media at home.

Parts:
$28 ROSEWILL Micro ATX Mini Tower Computer Case (5 internal drive bays, 2 fans included)
$35 Thermaltake Smart 500W 80+ White Continuous Power - Power Supply
$60 GIGABYTE GA-B250M-DS3H - Motherboard (6th/7th gen Intel, 6X SATA3, 4X DDR4)
$37 Intel CPU BX80662G3900 Celeron G3900 2.80Ghz
$8 SanDisk Ultra Fit 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive - OS drive
$185 Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 2133MHz
$60 each 4X WL 3TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA III 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal - Data drives

I will also be using these items that I already own:
APC Back-UPS Pro 1500VA UPS
Intel EXPI9301CT Gigabit CT PCI-e Desktop Adapter to replace the onboard RealTec NIC
2 SATA cables

I will test the RAM with at least three passes using Memtest86+. I plan to burn in the CPU using the Mersenne Prime test in 5, 10, 20, and 30 min increments. With the "White Label" hard drives, testing is extra EXTRA important. The 3TB 7200 spin drives were $60 each and WL 4TB drives were $90 each, so I was paying a better price per GB, and I increased my chance of getting unused overstock drives rather than refurbished drives. At least, that is what I am telling myself. I plan to use GSmartControl for SMART pre-testing as well as badblocks for full-surface write/read/verify passes.

Although I have done dozens of server builds for work over the years, this is my first FreeNAS build. To those of you who have built a handful of these over the years, do you see anything that is likely to cause me trouble? The parts are already ordered, but what changes would you have made that wouldn't entirely destroy my $600 budget? I believe that a different MB with ECC RAM was priced out of my range.

Thanks for having such a helpful and informed community here!

 

[Nick2253]

I would recommend looking at second-hand hardware. You can get a Xeon Workstation or a R510/R710 for under $300 on eBay.

If you do continue with your build, I would make the following recommendations:

• Spend a little bit more on a PSU to get something of higher quality. Not higher Watts, higher quality. A well recommended brand here is Seasonic. Bad power can sink you really fast, especially as your system gets older.
• Your memory seems ridiculously expensive. Without even looking for a deal, the Crucial kit on Amazon is $15 cheaper. Any basic memory will do.
• I think your hard drives are a poor choice. You generally get no warranty with white label drives, and they are often not at all what is advertised. Furthermore, 7200RPM drives are unnecessary, and add extra heat and vibration to your system.

Honestly, if we take a step back, I'm not sure that FreeNAS is the right project for your use case. The name of the game with FreeNAS is ZFS, and that runs a huge overhead to provide better security and redundancy. For significantly less hardware money, you could be running a simple file server. Heck, people use RaspberryPis with USB drives to do this. Or, if you really want the benefits that FreeNAS brings, I would strongly recommend the second-hand route, so you're actually providing capable hardware that meets the need. The analogy I've used in the past is: picking ZFS is like picking a Volvo - safety and security. So why would you make that choice, and then drive around without your seatbelt on (provide incapable, low quality, or non-error checking hardware)?

After reading through and researching everything, I saw this:

The parts are already ordered,

I mean, really? If you're already ordered everything, what's the point of soliciting feedback here?

 

[DrKK]

I mean, really? If you're already ordered everything, what's the point of soliciting feedback here?

+1

 

[nightshade00013]

Yeah you bought consumer grade parts which do not support ECC which is recommended. White label drives which can be suspect and then post your build after it's all purchased.

I for one understand not having a ton to do stuff with and wanting to do it cheaply but a lot of times you can get older servers and make them work very well. Basing your build off of a blog and then figuring it will work fine gets your foot in the door but ultimately can wreck your day if something fails.

 

[Linkman]

Absolutely burn in those drives, and then once you have the system up make sure you have SMART tests enabled and email notifications set up (and working!) so you can take advantage of FreeNAS' self-checks and early warnings of something going awry.

 

[Ericloewe]

Let me be absolutely clear.

Do NOT take advice from that Brian Moses guy. It is worthless and wrong most of the time and it will cause you future pain.

Those white label drives are cheap for a reason. They're write-once read-never devices. They are unreliable even by hard drive standards. Those unlucky enough to venture into that territory found themselves replacing all of the drives in mere months.

Seriously, Brian Moses is ignorant at best and actively working against your interests (for whatever reason) at worst. Contrary to the image of authority he tries to project, most of his builds are disasters. His "econoNAS" crap, in particular, is egregiously bad and places him in a similar position to Linus Tech Tips, minus the schadenfreude.

Mr. Moses, if you're crawling the web looking for mentions of you that you don't like, have the courage to engage with us in a discussion of your builds instead of complaining to iXsystems' marketing that people have called you out for your disastrously bad "advice".

 

[wblock]

That motherboard has a Realtek network interface. Adding an Intel network card will give better and more reliable network performance.

 

[JustinClift]

Let me be absolutely clear.

Do NOT take advice from that Brian Moses guy. It is worthless and wrong most of the time and it will cause you future pain.
...

Hadn't heard of Brian Moses before, so just Googled him. Interestingly... the FreeNAS blog points to his EconoNAS 2017 article:

http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas11-1_econas2017_truenasx10_issue-52/

"Brian Moses is back with another much-anticipated budget-friendly FreeNAS build. ..."

Seems like a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand? ;)

 

[Zredwire]

If you are looking to do a low cost FreeNAS build it is hard to beat the HPE entry level server. The HPE 837826-001 ML10. You can get it for $210 (http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?2338654_g10e) then add at least 8GB of ECC RAM ($100) for a total of 12Gb. Then depending on your setup you may need a extra power splitter for $6.27 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086OGN9E/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and then probably a display adapter (unless your monitor has a diplay port input) that cost $11.00. This server has connection for 6 hard drives. You can mount 6 hard drives in it without adapters and can mount up to 8 with some low cost adapters.
It is a very good starter server for FreeNAS for $327.00 (for the build above). It has ECC RAM and a built in Intel NIC. This is the server I started with and still use parts of it today in my build.

 

[Ericloewe]

Interestingly... the FreeNAS blog points to his EconoNAS 2017 article:

Don't get me started on that. It's a frustrating, uphill battle.

 

[maebo]

Thanks for all the great feedback!

Why did I ask after ordering parts? Mostly because I wanted confirmation of the build guide, but got the opposite! There is good documentation that Mr. Moses has actually built several of these every year since 2011, so I am surprised that he is so far off, but I don't doubt that the community here has the most accurate information.

Here are some specific questions and clarifications:
@Nick2253 What did you dislike about the $35 Thermaltake vs a comparable $90 Seasonic? I have seen good performance from Thermaltake PSU's in dozens of home PCs. What do you see as the primary drawback for this application?

I thought the RAM was overpriced, but it was the best match for the motherboard. I did see a comparable Crucial kit for a couple bucks cheaper, but thought that RAM might be one area to spend a couple extra bucks. Is your contention that all non-ECC RAM is inferior for this project, so I might as well buy the cheapest?

I found your comment about drives to be to be the most confusing. I don't want 7200 spin drives? I really thought I was looking for the highest read/write speeds I could afford. I absolutely realize there are some big risks involved with White Label drives because that can be remanufactured enterprise drives that have already failed in the field, but they can also be aging stock that has never been used. Last time I bought WL drives, they were WD Blacks with less than 100 spin hours at about a quarter of the retail price. These are not going into a production environment and they came with a 1-year warranty, so I thought they were a reasonable risk.

@wblock Lower in my notes I listed the Intel NIC that will replace the onboard RealTec.

I regularly have access to old HP ProLiant servers at work, so I may need to repurpose some the current hardware for another project, and wait for more appropriate server hardware. See! That was the value of asking here, even after buying hardware!

 

[wblock]

Lower in my notes I listed the Intel NIC that will replace the onboard RealTec.

Doh, sorry.

As far as the power supply, good clean power is worth paying for. The errors caused by a poor power supply can be subtle and hard to blame on a particular component. Occasional reboot or data corruption due to voltage ripple going a bit too far is usually going to be blamed on the operating system. The gold-rated power supplies use newer, more efficient designs that eliminate some problems. Trying to cut costs here is probably a false economy.

 

[Nick2253]

What did you dislike about the $35 Thermaltake vs a comparable $90 Seasonic? I have seen good performance from Thermaltake PSU's in dozens of home PCs. What do you see as the primary drawback for this application?

$35 vs $90 is a bit of a false equivalence, as there are also Seasonic PSUs available for less. I would personally recommend a visit to JonnyGuru, a wonderful resource on all things PSU. Excellent reviews, excellent forums. And that should help with some of the knowledge about what makes a good PSU.

I thought the RAM was overpriced, but it was the best match for the motherboard. I did see a comparable Crucial kit for a couple bucks cheaper, but thought that RAM might be one area to spend a couple extra bucks. Is your contention that all non-ECC RAM is inferior for this project, so I might as well buy the cheapest?

That is not at all my contention. I just don't see the point on wasting money buying unnecessary bling/performance that you won't use. The extra speed/timings on that memory (not to mention the unnecessary heat spreaders) will do nothing for you in practice. Memory capacity is far more important than things like that.

I found your comment about drives to be to be the most confusing. I don't want 7200 spin drives? I really thought I was looking for the highest read/write speeds I could afford.

For a file server, 4x 5400RPM drives in a RAIDZ2 are more than capable of saturating a 1Gbps link, so any additional speed is overkill. 7200RPM drives will provide a benefit of increased IOPS, but file server use cases are rarely IOPS limited (and the increase in IOPS is pretty minimal, anyway).

 

[maebo]

Thanks @Nick2253

Most of my experience with building computers comes from dozens of desktop builds. In that setting, RAM is often the primary choke point and Thermaltake is a solid choice for PSU. With production servers, I generally get detailed specs from the application developers and order an assembled server with multi-year support from the manufacturer, rather than selecting a pile of budget parts for assembly.

I especially appreciate your explanation about drive speed. I didn't realize that RAIDZ2 would be efficient enough to max the network link even with slower drives.

[edited for punctuation]