First build - cheapo

[Ralse]

Probably fishing for criticism here cuz it's a 'homeless man' build but I'll post anyway.
I have a truckload of hard drives (about 40) of various sizes which I would like to put to use.
Got a few tb of data that I need to sort out.
Of course I can't spend a lot of money, so I was wondering if this would be acceptable for a 3 head family's home server:
- Small case which neatly fits into closet Antec ISK600M
- Mobo with enough serial ATA slots ASRock C2550D4I
- Main hd will be recup from my old pc, 139g velociraptor 10k rpm
- 12g triple matched ram will also be recup from old pc (need to lookup which type etc to see if the ASRock supports this type of ram)
- It also has a 650watt PSU.

Purpose is to store a lot of my data on there, to contain all downloads and to stream from on tv.

 

[Spearfoot]

Probably fishing for criticism here cuz it's a 'homeless man' build but I'll post anyway.
I have a truckload of hard drives (about 40) of various sizes which I would like to put to use.
Got a few tb of data that I need to sort out.
Of course I can't spend a lot of money, so I was wondering if this would be acceptable for a 3 head family's home server:
- Small case which neatly fits into closet Antec ISK600M
- Mobo with enough serial ATA slots ASRock C2550D4I
- Main hd will be recup from my old pc, 139g velociraptor 10k rpm
- 12g triple matched ram will also be recup from old pc (need to lookup which type etc to see if the ASRock supports this type of ram)
- It also has a 650watt PSU.

Purpose is to store a lot of my data on there, to contain all downloads and to stream from on tv.

Welcome to the forums!

Regarding your proposed build:

• Many users have experienced problems with that ASRock motherboard; search the forum for details.
• A 10k RPM Velociraptor may be overkill for your FreeNAS boot drive; you can actually use inexpensive USB flash drives instead, and save the SATA port for another HDD.
• 12GB of RAM is adequate, but we always recommend ECC RAM for use in FreeNAS systems.
• Hopefully you have ~6 drives of the same or similar size in your truckload of drives; using dissimilar sized disks in a vdev will result in FreeNAS treating all the drives as if they are the size of the smallest drive in the vdev.

One of our moderators (@Ericloewe) has written an excellent "Hardware Recommendations Guide". Read it and these hardware burn-in threads to get started:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.17750/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-hard-drive-burn-in-testing.21451/

Good luck!

 

[Ralse]

Many thanks for this guidance.
I understand that people had issues with that mobo, I read so on the forum, yet it's features are then again difficult to resist.
Unless you can recommend an alternative? (meaning +10 serial ATA)

But...what should I do with my velociraptor :(
I love it so much but in comparison it became so tiny all the sudden...

Most hd's are the same size, desktop models that were replaced at work.
There are a few 3tb that were discarded from our servers which I lowvlvl formatted so they are now working again.
Boss couldn't risk using them again.

I did read some of the recommendation guide thingies, but I'll look at these in particular, thanks.

 

[Pitfrr]

I'm using the same motherboard (C2750) and it is surely a really appealing one!
There are workarounds regarding the issue but still no bugfix from AsRock which I find quite concerning because then you never know if one day you'll end up with a dead motherboard!
Notice also that on the C2x50 some SATA ports are driven by a marvel chipset which is said to be not very reliable (I didn't try it so I can't speak from experience).
All that and given its price, I wouldn't willingly buy it.

Unless you have a size constraint I'd choose an other model.
You could stay with a mini-ITX size or something a little bit bigger and if you need SATA ports, you could use an HBA card (LSI9211 or IBM M1015 are the favourites around here). You should get some good ideas in the HW recommendation guide .

If you have a truckload of drives then use some of them for backups, especially if you don't use ECC RAM or if you use hard drives that might have some weaknesses.

 

[Ralse]

I'll need to follow up your advice on the truckload of hard discs.
I had 4 big ones left from a server but I listed them all up yesterday evening and it seems that they are the infamous Seagate ST3000DM001 :/
Guess I'll have to dive into my wallet and get some other 3tb discs later on.
Project postponed for now.
Thanks for the advice.