First NAS Build, Help Needed/Build Check

[bleejean]

Hey everyone!
I am new here and I am getting ready to build my first NAS. I have been doing some research and I am quite overwhelmed. I want something that I can store all my media on (and stream to the rest of the house), download torrents, and do backups to.

Right now I am thinking of doing a FreeNAS setup with RAIDZ2. I am thinking of using 8 3TB WD Red drives. I know that is not the ideal number of drives but size and reliability is more important to me than speed. If I understand correctly that will give me about 18TB of storage (less after formatting).

What I need help with is whether my old computer can be salvaged to make the NAS or if I should just buy new, budget components. I built a gaming computer in 2006 and it has a AMD Athlon 64X2 4400+ Socket 939 processor in it. It has 4GB of DDR RAM and an Asus ASR32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire motherboard. It also has a 550W Antec power supply which I am pretty sure would be more than enough. What do you think about the other components though? Are they suitable?

Can I just add, say 2 PCI SATA cards with 4 SATA ports each, and then finish the build? Any recommendations for such cards?

I know that I would also need a drive for the boot drive, as well as a drive (maybe 2 for mirroring) for the ZIL data, and I was thinking of just getting the cheapest available SSDs for those.

Also, it has a Sapphire HD3870 video card in it (the second one died). I think that it won't add any performance to a NAS that doesn't do video transcoding or anything so I would just remove it. Unless there is some benefit I don't know about.

I really appreciate any advice you can offer!

 

[tirsojrp]

I am a noob too but I am sure you need modern hardware to handle that setup.

Your board is limited to 4Gb of ram, it falls below the recommended system specs.
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#RAM

As for the RAID card the IBM 1015 seems to be the favorite around here.

 

[bleejean]

Thanks for your reply tirsojrp.
Can others confirm if the hardware I already have won't work or if it will work but not ideally (and what sort of usability I can expect).

I don't need a very fast box. If it would be comparable or better to an external hard drive attached to a network I would probably be happy. I would like to use ZFS for the better error correction/reliability.

As for that RAID card, it is quite expensive. I thought I read that FreeNAS and ZFS work better without any hardware RAID. Can I get something like a SATA expander PCI card that would just add more SATA ports without RAID or anything fancy?

 

[Stephens]

A few ideas to consider...

1) I'm not sure how much you're paying for the hard drives, but it'd seem a modern motherboard/cpu/ram combo would be a small bump in cost relatively. That said, you're not going to get definitive performance numbers and I don't think you need them. If you're going to try to piece meal, go ahead and do it and see what you think. But keep in mind, the recommendation is 1GB of ram for each TB of usable storage. Using that rule of thumb, you're closer to needing 16GB of RAM than 4GB. I'd expect instability, which isn't what you want when it comes to your data.

2) When people talk about the M1015, they're talking about using it in non-RAID mode. In fact, I believe they flash it (read up on it here) to LSI. Also, some people get it from eBay so they don't pay retail prices. You do not want to use a RAID card in RAID mode with FreeNAS. But yes, there are other cards you can use, but you need to make sure they're compatible with FreeNAS (FreeBSD). And there are various levels of compatible. You can search here for "highpoint" as well. I think noobsauce80 is pretty versed in those.

3) You can dump the video card.

4) Get a UPS.

 

[cyberjock]

A few ideas to consider...

1) I'm not sure how much you're paying for the hard drives, but it'd seem a modern motherboard/cpu/ram combo would be a small bump in cost relatively. That said, you're not going to get definitive performance numbers and I don't think you need them. If you're going to try to piece meal, go ahead and do it and see what you think. But keep in mind, the recommendation is 1GB of ram for each TB of usable storage. Using that rule of thumb, you're closer to needing 16GB of RAM than 4GB. I'd expect instability, which isn't what you want when it comes to your data.

2) When people talk about the M1015, they're talking about using it in non-RAID mode. In fact, I believe they flash it (read up on it here) to LSI. Also, some people get it from eBay so they don't pay retail prices. You do not want to use a RAID card in RAID mode with FreeNAS. But yes, there are other cards you can use, but you need to make sure they're compatible with FreeNAS (FreeBSD). And there are various levels of compatible. You can search here for "highpoint" as well. I think noobsauce80 is pretty versed in those.

3) You can dump the video card.

4) Get a UPS.

+1 to all of this.