BUILD First NAS Build

[Pastafarian]

Hello all, i have been wanting to make an NAS for awhile and have finally assembled my parts list after checking several recommendations from here and other websites.
Case : Cooler Master Elite 130
Mobo : Tyan Mini ITX Server Motherboard
CPU : Intel Pentium G3258
Ram : Crucial 8gb ECC Unbuffered
PSU :SeaSonic SSR-360GP 360W
HDD : 4x WD RED 2 TB

That brings my total to about $800 including taxes and shipping. I am not clear on ram registered vs unbuffered but i believe unbuffered is the way to go. I went with the gold certificed PSU and mini itx mobo for power consumption/efficiency purposes. Would this NAS be able to stream HD media to 3 devices simultaneously. Thanks for any answers and/or constructive criticism!

 

[budmannxx]

You didn't list a motherboard, but the other parts look like they should be OK. Make sure your mobo supports ECC too. Don't worry about registered RAM, unbuffered is fine. Your question about FreeNAS being installed on a USB drive is answered in section 1.3.3 of the user guide. You should read the rest of that guide too. It has a ton of great info.

 

[Ericloewe]

What's the motherboard?

We advise against Kingston because of a number of shady maneuvers they've pulled recently, one of which directly affected several people here who had bough their RAM only to find it was incompatible, despite assurances to the contrary by Kingston.

You can forget Registered memory exists - it's not for you (or for me). It's for servers that need a lot of memory, as it allows for much larger (and more) DIMMs. All consumer stuff and low-end server stuff uses Unbuffered RAM exclusively.

3 drives... I assume you're looking at RAIDZ1 - which is something we do not recommend, as it has a much greater potential for loss of data than RAIDZ2.

You cannot use the drive that contains the FreeNAS installation for anything else. That's why USB drives are recommended. Use a decent 4GB or larger drive.

The PSU is a very good choice, but consider the G450 if you'd like modular cables.

 

[Pastafarian]

lol sorry about that, i did forget to list the mobo. I guess i will keeping searching for ram then if that is the case with kingston. Hadn't given much thought about raid but i was planning on using zfs, is there a specific number of drives i need in order to use it?

 

[Ericloewe]

Read this, it'll answer many questions:

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

As for the motherboard, be aware that you won 't be able to use more than 16GB of RAM, which may be a limit in the medium-term future. I believe there's an ASRock model that's miniITX and has four DIMM slots...

 

[Pastafarian]

So it sounds like raidz2 is the way to go, but other than a missing drive and possible mobo upgrade would this be able to stream HD media to up to 3 devices at any given time?

 

[Ericloewe]

So it sounds like raidz2 is the way to go, but other than a missing drive and possible mobo upgrade would this be able to stream HD media to up to 3 devices at any given time?

Stream yes. For transcoding you'd need a faster processor though, probably a low-end Xeon E3.

 

[budmannxx]

Your network will probably be your bottleneck for "streaming," unless you're talking about transcoding.

 

[budmannxx]

Jinx.

@Pastafarian, read through the user guide and forum stickies. Most of this stuff has been answered lots of times already.

 

[cyberjock]

Be aware that Tyan branded stuff isn't used much around here. If there are any weird hardware problems you are likely to be "on your own" to solve them.

 

[Ericloewe]

Be aware that Tyan branded stuff isn't used much around here. If there are any weird hardware problems you are likely to be "on your own" to solve them.

I can attest to this forum's usefulness in solving really obscure issues with Supermicro X10 boards (the more popular ones around here - did half the forum start using FreeNAS in the last year?).
My X10SLM+-F was ramping the fans up to 100% and down again every few seconds. One of the first results when googling the issue was a thread here that not only explained that the fans' failure threshold was set too high, so that some fans were considered "failing" by the BMC, which ramped them to 100% to prevent them from stopping, but also gave nearly step-by-step instructions on how to fix the issue.