BUILD First Build - Hardware Suggestions Needed

[mda]

Hello all,

I'm looking to build my first box. I have already read many HW recommendation threads and unfortunately I may have to omit what may be the most important part -- ECC RAM/Xeons and basic server motherboards due to the sheer cost of the hardware in my country (unfortunately, I am in the 1% countries where the price premium is sky high). In short, unless I want a buy a brand new rack mounted server or a giant IBM/HP tower from a certified reseller, server motherboards and ECC RAM are just not available. Even 2nd hand Xeons available are of the Core2Quad era or older (not to mention very shady sellers), so I'm ruling these out due to age as well.

With that said, I am looking to build a box with the following specs:

Intel i5 2400 Sandy Bridge underclocked and undervolted to however low I can get it
Gigabyte H67 D2 B3 with a built in Realtek 1gbps RTL8111E LAN, 2x SATA 6gbps and 4x SATA 3gbps from the chipset
8GB DDR3 1333
2x 4TB Seagate ST4000M000
2x 2TB Seagate Green Drives from an older DLink DNS-320.
(Expansion room for 2 more drives)
Fractal Node 304/804 Case
Seasonic X650 PSU
Kingston or Corsair 16GB USB Thumb Drive
Sine Wave UPS

My main purpose for this box will be for the home as a secondary backup, as a plex server and for transmission clients.

Will there be any bigger issue here other than the lack of ECC RAM? I understand that I may have issues with the NIC, so I will also be doing research on that as well.

Thank you and more power.

 

[marbus90]

Since you have only 4 disks listed, look at Lenovo TS140 or TS440, Dell T20 or T110 II, HP Microserver Gen8 or ML310e Gen8 v2 plus one 8GB DIMM, done. ECC compatible and cheap.

 

[mda]

Thanks. Will try to look around for one of these.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, FreeNAS and ZFS is a "do it right or don't do it" type of thing. If you aren't willing to spend the money to "do it right" you are very likely to find that FreeNAS just won't do the things you want it to do because of hardware problems and such. Things like the onboard extras that come on desktops have been show stoppers for some people. So you might think you're saving money right now, but when its built and if it won't even boot without crashing or something, don't expect too much shock or a working solution. There often isn't one.

I love Gigabyte desktop stuff (all of my desktops are built with Gigabyte motherboards). But desktop boards are NOT appropriate for FreeNAS.