First FreeNAS Build

[YotaX]

Been reading a lot - gathered enough info to put together this build.
A brief history I have been building gaming PC's for over 15 years. This will be my first Server Grade Build.

What I plan to do with the FreeNAS build is going to be to move my Plex Server over - move my Ubuntu Server Backup to a raid Z - host the storage for my nextcloud on raid Z (edited)
I might tinker with VMs / Jails and odds and ends but thats not clear yet.

I think for what I am trying to do and to avoid having to rebuild in the next 4-5 years twin xeon processors > single xeon 10 core tho I could be wrong.
Here is what I have so far :) Let me know what y'all think!

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yNZzvn
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yNZzvn/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core OEM/Tray Processor ($168.00 @ Amazon)
CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-Core OEM/Tray Processor ($168.00 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock - EP2C602-4L/D16 SSI EEB Dual-CPU LGA2011 Motherboard ($299.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Samsung - 16GB (1 x 16GB) Registered DDR3-1866 Memory ($87.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Samsung - 16GB (1 x 16GB) Registered DDR3-1866 Memory ($87.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Samsung - 16GB (1 x 16GB) Registered DDR3-1866 Memory ($87.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Samsung - 16GB (1 x 16GB) Registered DDR3-1866 Memory ($87.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: XFX - Radeon RX 580 8GB GTS Black Core Edition Video Card (Purchased For $0.00)
Power Supply: Corsair - HX Platinum 850W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($159.99 @ Amazon)
Other: Silverstone Technology CS380B Silverstone DIY ATX NAS Storage Case with Hot Swap Cases ($124.99 @ Amazon)
Other: HGST Deskstar NAS 0S04005 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" ($129.73 @ Amazon)
Other: HGST Deskstar NAS 0S04005 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" ($123.99 @ Amazon)
Other: HGST Deskstar NAS 0S04005 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" ($123.99 @ Amazon)
Other: HGST Deskstar NAS 0S04005 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" ($123.99 @ Amazon)

 

[Chris Moore]

move my Ubuntu Server Backup to a dedicated raid 5

Are you building a FreeNAS system or not?

host the storage for my nextcloud on raid 5

We don't have "raid 5" in FreeNAS.

Video Card: XFX - Radeon RX 580 8GB GTS Black Core Edition Video Card (Purchased For $0.00)

You don't need a video card. The system board has a built in VGA controller and FreeNAS only puts a text console on the local monitor. Everything is administered by a GUI that is in a web page.

Why are you spending that much money to buy new when you could likely have a better system used from eBay? I will pick one out for you if you like...

Motherboard: ASRock - EP2C602-4L/D16 SSI EEB Dual-CPU LGA2011 Motherboard ($299.99 @ Newegg)

That motherboard is not fitting in that chassis:

Other: Silverstone Technology CS380B Silverstone DIY ATX NAS Storage Case with Hot Swap Cases ($124.99 @ Amazon)

No way.

Please read these:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

 

[YotaX]

Ok I misspoke on the raid 5 - im used to calling it that first time using FreeNAS but my correct use of words should be Raid-Z - :) I have thought about going the used server route with dual PSU for fault protection - I worry about previous life history and the systems being stressed to the max before being sold and updated. Any advice in that department is recommend - as far as the case yeah I was wondering about that im glad I asked :) Its more a backup server / plex and ill have a scrapped together backup server to backup this server during the nights. I appreciate the quick reply btw! :) I was also reading that a raid-Z2 would be better recommend for 4TB drivers over a raid Z1. From what I have read and gathered the z1 is more like a 5 and the z2 is more like a 6 allowing 2 drives to fail. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also for the GPU I just wanted to make note I already have it just laying in the closet I just listed it on the build, prob not going to run it, have not looked into if it can be used for processing power but im assuming not.

 

[Chris Moore]

Also for the GPU I just wanted to make note I already have it just laying in the closet I just listed it on the build, prob not going to run it, have not looked into if it can be used for processing power but im assuming not.

Can't use it for anything in FreeNAS. May as well put in on eBay.

I have thought about going the used server route with dual PSU for fault protection

Sorry, I got really tied up at work today. I will get you a list of items together later this evening

 

[Inxsible]

I worry about previous life history and the systems being stressed to the max before being sold and updated. Any advice in that department is recommend

You needn't worry about that. Many, including myself have bought used systems. Do make sure that you test all the components that you buy within the first few days of buying them. New or used.

I was also reading that a raid-Z2 would be better recommend for 4TB drivers over a raid Z1.

Correct.

From what I have read and gathered the z1 is more like a 5 and the z2 is more like a 6 allowing 2 drives to fail. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Correct again.

Even if you buy new, there are many other options for under $299.00 that you are willing to pay for the AsRock motherboard. But, I would go the used route. I don't think you need a dual-processor board for a backup server and a Plex server. I use a single Pentium G3240 to do both. You can even run light VMs with a single processor unless you plan to run more than a few VMs. Although, for backup/plex AND VMs you'd need something beefier than a Pentium obviously. Think base Xeons E3-1240V2 and above based on your socket of course.

Buy a X9/X10 based system with DDR3 RAM. Look for a board that supports Registered ECC RAM rather than unbuffered as the Registered RAM is cheaper by a huge margin currently.

 

[YotaX]

awesome, so I have done some research after y'all pointing to a used system and I have a guy local that is selling a "workstation" that has peaked my interest.

"Hi everyone. I have a custom Dual CPU (Westmere )Supermicro Workstation for sale. This machine is a few years old, but is still plenty powerful for today's workloads. It shines in any multi-threaded task; encoding/decoding, virtualization, video editing, server tasks, or gaming. I am pretty sure you can create a hackintosh with this setup, but I have never tried. Everything works perfectly and I just installed fresh Windows 7 on a 512GB SSD.

Specs:

(2x) Intel Xeon X5690 CPU @3.46GHz (12C/24T total)
(2x) SilverStone Argon 92mm CPU coolers
48GB (6x 8GB) DDR3-1600 RAM
Supermicro X8DAL-i motherboard
Gigabyte 2GB GTX 960 windforce graphics
Mushkin Enhanced ECO 512GB SSD
(4x) Toshiba PH3200U 2TB HDD (in RAID 10)
Supermicro CSE-732i-500B Chassis with 500W Bronze Power supply
Windows 7 Ultimate Retail"

I appreciate all the info! Looking forward to learning more about this entirely different side to technology :p

 

[Inxsible]

Supermicro X8DAL-i motherboard

A bit older than what I was pointing towards, but it should work. Again, are you sure you *must* have dual-processors?

 

[CraigD]

I would either get a 4U rack mount case or a full tower or two with as many 5.25" bays as you can, then add hot swap bays.

Noise is not an issue if you buy the right fans, the bigger the case the better cooling can be.

New or used is fine, either way test everything, why reinvent the wheel, look at peoples signatures, the most common setups are popular for a reason, once you go IPMI you wont ever want to be without it

Think hard about your drive layout, because vdev drive numbers cannot be changed, vdevs of 6 and 8 drives are most common for media and read the links @Chris Moore has posted


Have Fun

 

[YotaX]

Im trying to not be limited my cores or threads when it comes to playing around with jails / vms / plex transcoding / or any other cool things I stumble across in my adventure to get away from my USB backup drives with a old laptop hosting my plex server haha.
Also he is asking 450 for that setup.
Ill give a quick rundown of how crude my current server setup is haha - but it works lol with minimal fault protection
I currently host my ubuntu server in a VM off my Mac mini on its own battery backup.
I have a plex server hosted off a old Samsung laptop that also acts as my file server with a 4tb external HDD for my redundant backups along with a 2tb external hdd for my plex server storage no redundant backup for this drive and no backup to date actually im almost at capacity thus promoting this push to learn into all this :)
I also have plugged into this a 1tb old 2.5 hdd in a external plug and play enclosure to house all my nextcloud files. it backups to the 4tb. my vm is backed to my 4tb also. Im hosting 4 websites and 1 nextcloud server. I feel like im heavy outgrowing this crude yet somehow functional setup lol. So before something bad happens I want to discover all my options and get fault protection in place for everything.

I am building a a very basic 16gb ram pentium server to use as my NAS redundant backup server im basically taking all my old HDDs and putting them in there to backup everything 2- that is going to run freenass but its just to act as a NAS for backups nothing more.
im adding a network switch so I can do gigabit networking between all these systems also
The system y'all are helping me with is going to host plex - and possibly a few jails once I learn more about them so I can get my web hosting off the VM Mac mini lol

Sorry for the long message, just thought I would put out all my intentions .

 

[YotaX]

I would either get a 4U rack mount case or a full tower or two with as many 5.25" bays as you can, then add hot swap bays.

Noise is not an issue if you buy the right fans, the bigger the case the better cooling can be.

New or used is fine, either way test everything, why reinvent the wheel, look at peoples signatures, the most common setups are popular for a reason, once you go IPMI you won't ever want to be without it

Think hard about your drive layout, because vdev drive numbers cannot be changed, vdevs of 6 and 8 drives are most common for media and read the links @Chris Moore has posted


Have Fun

TY :)
If I got that system I listed above I was going to take the ssd out and add 2 more 4tb hdd to max out the sata slots on the board - from there I was going to add a 400gig 750 series in pcie for cache -

The struggle im having is I don't want to skimp on power for what ill end up needing and I don't want to have 2 much power and never use it all.
I was also thinking to add a PCI to sata passthrough card to do a second pool of drives after I figure out exactly what all im going to need.
I have heard that u can do the sata through pci as long as the board does not have any control over raid because FreeNAS wants to be able to have complete control over each drive?

It also seems as if I could trash the case and move the components over to a 4u case like u spoke of.
This one here seems nice https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-Rackmount-Computer-Pre-Installed-RSV-R4000/dp/B00N9CXGSO?th=1

 

[Inxsible]

I still think you are over-estimating your CPU requirements. Backup is not CPU intensive. Streaming via Plex or Emby is not CPU intensive (Transcoding is different and does require CPU -- but then you need to figure out how many transcodes you will run). Jails -- depending on what you are doing may or may not be CPU intensive.

I run CouchPotato, Transmission, Emby, Deluge in 4 different jails without a spike in CPU usage. Your VMs will need CPU, but I am not asking you to use a Pentium -- Use a decent Xeon and you should be fine. Again, you haven't laid out what you are actually going to do in VMs. Will your VMs be that processor intensive? You mentioned you were only going to tinker around with VMs.

Again, I am not saying don't get a dual-processor board, but given what you have laid out until now, it is not necessary.

 

[YotaX]

Again, you haven't laid out what you are actually going to do in VMs. Will your VMs be that processor intensive? You mentioned you were only going to tinker around with VMs.

Well thats the thing, idk what I can do with VM's and jails yet. What I would love to be able to do is run a Ubuntu Server in a jail and it seems that its still possible or it might be being removed but then there is going to be a alternative way to do it. So thats kinda up in the air if I can figure out how to do such a act. I would also like to try and setup a mail server / VPN / nextcloud

I also want to see about doing a gui ubuntu also long side the sever version.

I don't even know if this is possible but I have been looking into being able to push some of my rendering projects off my MacBook Pro onto the server (this is all in theory as I have not looked into it yet) but if I could I would like to use the power of the server to render while I can continue to work on different projects. This again is all in theory.
I have looked into a 10 core xeon single cpu im just trying to look at all my options and everyones input has been great gives me new things to google! lol
I learn much faster hands on so even tho I have read so much about what I can do with everything its hard to know exactly what I want till I have it booted up and can start pressing buttons! :)

I also have seen a video in v11 that someone has managed to get windows 10 running! that would be awesome to just eliminate my other laptop all together. so ill def be trying that one out.

 

[Chris Moore]

Specs:

(2x) Intel Xeon X5690 CPU @3.46GHz (12C/24T total)
(2x) SilverStone Argon 92mm CPU coolers
48GB (6x 8GB) DDR3-1600 RAM
Supermicro X8DAL-i motherboard
Gigabyte 2GB GTX 960 windforce graphics
Mushkin Enhanced ECO 512GB SSD
(4x) Toshiba PH3200U 2TB HDD (in RAID 10)
Supermicro CSE-732i-500B Chassis with 500W Bronze Power supply
Windows 7 Ultimate Retail"

Most likely the person wants far too much for this because of the Windowz license and the video card. Plus, you don't need a 500GB boot SSD for FreeNAS. This is too much of the wrong kind of hardware. Stand by, I will find you something appropriate.

 

[YotaX]

Most likely the person wants far too much for this because of the Windowz license and the video card. Plus, you don't need a 500GB boot SSD for FreeNAS. This is too much of the wrong kind of hardware. Stand by, I will find you something appropriate.

Awesome ty:)
He is asking 450.
Looking forward to what you find

 

[Chris Moore]

I think for what I am trying to do and to avoid having to rebuild in the next 4-5 years twin xeon processors > single xeon 10 core tho I could be wrong.
Here is what I have so far :) Let me know what y'all think!

I think this would be a good solution for you. If you want to try running some virtual machines, you might want to put ESXi on the bare metal and pass SAS controllers through to a virtual instance of FreeNAS. Then you can share the FreeNAS storage back to ESXi and use it to host other virtual machines.
Have a look at this hardware:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/4U-Supermi...-server-2x-Xeon-Sandy-Bridge-CPU/142840530894
The CPUs are a little slower than what you were looking at, but if you find you need more, you can always upgrade later.
The memory is also less but, again, you can upgrade it and this system board can take up to 1.5TB of RAM. It also has IPMI for remote management, which is a big plus.

Here is another thread where the builder is putting together the ESXi hosting FreeNAS, really well documented:

Build Report: Node 304 + X10SDV-TLN4F [ESXi/FreeNAS AIO]
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

 

[YotaX]

Here is another thread where the builder is putting together the ESXi hosting FreeNAS, really well documented:

Build Report: Node 304 + X10SDV-TLN4F [ESXi/FreeNAS AIO]
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

Thank you for this thread! I plan on reading it tonight - looks like he did just what want to do! I am also going to pickup this one local for 450 tonight so I can play around with it and learn freenas, The one you found me on eBay I will be buying also - I plan on just doing it right and getting a server rack. Im going to mount the one u have found me and then convert the one im getting tonight into a 4u and mount it also. Now I just need to go ahead and find a good used screen for the server rack :P due time. But I do look forward to playing with all this new fun stuff over the weekend! Ill post up some pics once I get both systems picked up and the other one built!
I can't thank everyone enough for all the help!

 

[Chris Moore]

With the IPMI remote control, you can access it from the network and do not need a local monitor

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[YotaX]

So the build is now under construction. One primary FreeNAS server and one secondary backup server. The backup server might not even be FreeNAS I cant decide yet. It’s not running ECC ram all its going to do is hold the backups for the main server - I have decided to dial down my ambitions for this build and will only be hosting my Plex server, a NAS and possibly a jailed Linux server. I know ill come up with more things to play with but for now this is where I’m a start. Current Specs of system in the works,
X5690 X2
48 gab ram
X8DAL-I
LSI 9210-8i HBA
6X 2TB HDD 3.5
5X 500gb HDD 2.5 in a hotswap tray
3X 1TB HDD 2.5 in a tray
Ill be ordering a IPMI card Monday to add.
So my question is I have all this storage and my question is how to partition / setup the drives. My Plex server is only about 2TB currently - so I wanna allocate 4 gb to this - 4gb to server backups and the 5x 500gb to store my nextcloud I was thinking Z1 for the nextcloud and z2 for Plex and server backup and the 3x 1TB in z1 setup for random files and transfer.
I also just upgraded my home to dual wan to help with Plex and nextcloud -
Any advice to set up the partitions or pools or vdevs would be awesome :)
**EDIT** I thought it might be better to offer what ill be backing up on the 4TB backup it will be split into 2 2TB backups if possible 1 backup will be for my Active server backups and the other side of that 2TB will be the active backup for all the macs in my house - the backup server will be backing up my Plex and my server backup along with nextcloud. **EDIT**

I will be booting tonight - Boot drive is going to be 2 16gb flash drives in mirror :)

Backup system will have 6x 2TB HDD
Basic Pentium HDD and a standard Mobo in a mini case - very basic has 16 gb ram non ecc tho which is why I think bad idea for FreeNAS might do a windows 7 and just o a HW raid through the Mobo.