BUILD First FreeNAS box - a proof of concept, to work

[Asday]

G'morning. I work at a small school photography company, and keeping our data safe is something I want to get more serious about here, because of course, our photos are our jobs. I've been nerding out over ZFS and FreeNAS stuff for about a month and a half now, and have come to put a build together for a couple reasons.

I want to have some huge lump of storage at home for films, music, recordings of my streaming, and all such home-use NAS stuff. It would also be nice if I could run torrents without my main PC being on, and that's something I'm fairly sure FreeNAS can do. I am fairly sensible with my money, most of the time, so I find myself with a bunch of it spare, and want to take this opportunity to build a FreeNAS box, get familiar with it, and decide, informedly, if it's the right solution for my company.

After going through a whole bunch of reading material, I've arrived at this build:

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Asday/saved/YQ6mP6

For those who would prefer not to click:

Motherboard: AsRock C2750D4I
Memory: Crucial 16GB kit (8GBx2) DDR3 PC3-12800 Unbuffered ECC
Flash: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16GB (off a Startech USB header -> USB port adapter)
PSU: SeaSonic 660W SS-660XP2 Fully Modular 80+ Platinum
Storage: 6xWestern Digital Red 4TB 5900RPM
Case: NZXT H2 White

Being my first foray into this - all my previous builds have been photoshop drones, or gaming PCs - I'm not sure what's overkill and what's not, there.

Also, as I haven't completely watched yet, I'm not sure how much usable space I'll have.

Given that it will be for bulk storage of media, not anything particularly important, I'm not bothered about the safety of the data. If I lose a couple terabytes of films, it's no big deal, I can rerip my BDs. With this in mind, how should I be setting up my disks, and how much space will that give me?

If I've made any particularly egregious mis-steps, please don't hesitate to give me a swift kick in the pants.

 

[L]

If you aren't worried about performance or reliability, then one 6 disk raidz would be fine. In that you will have 1 disk of the 6 for redundancy very close to the rest useable space.

This video is very old. I would suggest signing up for the free freenas class that is offered daily http://www.onlinemeetingnow.com/register/?id=iq3m1ajlzk. I also have a zfs bootcamp on my website which is a lot more current then ben's stuff.. very similar content. http://kateleyco.com/?page_id=783

 

[Asday]

Bump.

(Is bumping cool here...?)

 

[anodos]

Your part choices look fine, but I'll give a few small nitpicks:

1) PSU is overpowered. You can save some money going with lower output.

2) get two USB sticks. 9.3 allows mirroring your boot device.

3) you may also want to explore the price difference between your atom-based motherboard and a server motherboard with an i3 processor.

A 6-disk raidz2 pool should be fine in your circumstances. Although you didn't address this directly, you need to put some thought into how you will back up your data (or at a minimum the data that is truly valuable).

 

[mjws00]

Nothing too interesting in your build. The power supply is on the large side, but that may make it useful later if repurposing. FreeNAS can certainly run transmission for ya.

You mention keeping data safe, and then talk about how losing a few TB wouldn't matter. So that is tough to follow. I'd really just lean towards keeping the pool safe if I were you. So go with RAIDZ2. You'll have 2 parity disks, and 4 usable. Raidz1 is a risk (read RAID5 is dead) while resilvering that pool when you lose a drive due to risk of a URE.

EDIT: Similar to anodos... hitting enter any way.

 

[diedrichg]

After your initial purchase you will want to buy another 1-2 drives to keep on the shelf come the day one of them decides to take a crap. You can then immediately pop in the new drive as you wait for another to be shipped rather than sweating your balls off or shutting down the server for five days waiting for the replacement drive to arrive.

 

[Asday]

Your part choices look fine, but I'll give a few small nitpicks:

1) PSU is overpowered. You can save some money going with lower output.

I think I was scared by the spin up draw when switching it on. How much did I overshoot?

3) you may also want to explore the price difference between your atom-based motherboard and a server motherboard with an i3 processor.

I literally picked from parts I've used before, or parts on the recommended list... How do I know what I'm buying is super cool?

(or at a minimum the data that is truly valuable).

None, really. It's mostly my bluray rips that would cost me maybe a couple days to rerip the ones I care about. I suppose my roommate might put stuff on there he cares about so maybe I'll get him to worry about backing up.

You mention keeping data safe, and then talk about how losing a few TB wouldn't matter. So that is tough to follow.

When I build one for work, data is important. This specific build, the first one, is for personal use; mostly archival, so the data on this one is irrelevant.

After your initial purchase you will want to buy another 1-2 drives to keep on the shelf come the day one of them decides to take a crap. You can then immediately pop in the new drive as you wait for another to be shipped rather than sweating your balls off or shutting down the server for five days waiting for the replacement drive to arrive.

I'll definitely do that with the "for work" build, that's a great idea I hadn't thought of.

 

[diedrichg]

I think I was scared by the spin up draw when switching it on. How much did I overshoot?

I did some Googling on this once. Reds draw about 5-7W at idle and about 12-15W on spin up, if I remember correctly.

 

[enemy85]

I did some Googling on this once. Reds draw about 5-7W at idle and about 12-15W on spin up, if I remember correctly.

With an i3 4130 and 5 3tb red disks, i'm using a seasonic 360w good psu and it idles neither at 50w.

 

[nick779]

With an i3 4130 and 5 3tb red disks, i'm using a seasonic 360w good psu and it idles neither at 50w.

I have a G3240, 4 1tb reds and 2 1tb blues and I idle at 41w, all on a g360. Startup is around ~65W judging from my UPS

 

[marbus90]

I did some Googling on this once. Reds draw about 5-7W at idle and about 12-15W on spin up, if I remember correctly.

Datasheet says up to 1.75A@12V per disk, equaling 21W. I'd add ~12A on 12V for safe measure for board, CPU etc.