First time FreeNAS user hardware specs assistance needed

[msterw]

I have a Windows 7 machine with a two drive mirror that has failed. I am tired of moving data from one system to another so am thinking of converting this box to a NAS. Having just learned about FreeNas yesterday I am trying to figure out how best to configure my box and money matters for me. I will be accessing the box from four windows laptops in a home workgroup scenario sometimes wireless sometimes wired. Windows shares will be primary means of access however.

Current box has:
ASUS M4A77TD MotherBoard - 6 SATA 1 slots
AMD Phenon II X2 545 Processor 3.00 GHz
KVR1333D3N9K2/4G -4GB (2GB 256M x 64-Bit x 2 pcs.)
CASE with 500watt power supply.

I have no hard drives.

I want to put in 6 drives in RAIDZ2.

So my questions:
1. Is my hardware above reasonable and will it work. Seems to me that in some places it suggest that it will and in other places it is not listed. Yes I will back up data on NAS as well.

2. If I want to use 1TB drives and money matters, does it matter what I use? I don't want to build the slowest system in the world but I have some speed limitations already.

3. Do I need to increase my memory? If yes, do I need a different type of memory? I see reference to ECC memory. My memory does not specifically say that it is ECC memory so I assume that it is not.

Thanks for your help.
System will primarly be used to store pictures (as a photgrapher I will soon have a Terabyte of RAW image format files), iTunes library, and general home computer files.

 

[jgreco]

I have no experience with that motherboard and CPU. However, if it's compatible with FreeBSD (which it probably is- check out Google), you're probably fine.

Modern gear should be able to serve files at very high speeds without issue, or, at least, as fast as and usually much faster than the vendor-based NAS solutions which you see in the store. For a home workgroup, you're probably only talking gigabit speeds, and I imagine your setup would not be the bottleneck there.

Modern hard drives often transfer data at speeds around or greater than that of gigabit ethernet. You can see other users who have used modest gear such as the HP Proliant Microserver who are getting speeds of greater than 100MByte/sec local access; that should be enough to make a huge dent in a gig ethernet. Multiple drives increases that. On the other hand, small files will slow down access, as seek time plays a much larger role.

For a home fileserver, I would personally look towards lower speed, lower power 5400RPM drives as you probably won't really notice much of a difference while storing large files.

If you want to use 1TB drives, you might want to use 2TB drives instead, as the price per byte seems better in many cases.

You would be better off with 8GB, as FreeNAS currently seems to have some issues with ZFS and smaller amounts of memory.

 

[msterw]

FreeBSD offers crazy help. Phenom chips are not listed as supported but there is a references in a release that suggest they are. "The cpufreq(4) driver now supports Phenom (Family 10h)." So I presume this means it is and if the chip is then the board is?

Oh and I rechecked the specs on my board and found out that it actually supports Sata II not Sata I as first thought.

Iam thinking that since my memory is not ECC if I am going to replace I might as well max the board to the full 16 GB RAM since there are lots of comments on these forums about needing tons of memory.

So you are thinking lower Spindle speed is fine. I was asking a friend in general earlier what he thought about drive cache versus spindle speed and he thought the speed mattered more then the cache but he also doesn't know anything about these NAS systems. When I look at prices, that seems to be a bit of a trade off. Based on current drive prices, I was leaning towards 1.5TB Western Digital WD15EARS GREEN but heard that heat may be an issue with them. I can't afford the black ones though.

I am still on the fence with going forward with all of this though.

 

[jgreco]

Don't know what to say about Phenom support. It probably is a pain to keep up with the trade names the CPU manufacturers use for these things.

Don't let me stop you from putting 16GB of RAM in your system, but on the other hand, it may be overkill.

I typically look at lower spindle speeds for a few reasons. For average users, there's already latency introduced by doing accesses over the network. The difference between going over the network onto a 7200RPM drive and going over the network onto a 5400 (or 5900)RPM drive is less noticeable than the difference between those options when attached locally. The faster drives are typically more expensive and also tend to run hotter, and as such, may be somewhat less reliable. If your access patterns are mostly storing larger files, the seek times (and therefore also the rotational speed) are less of a factor than the speed at which data can be accessed sequentially, and pretty much any modern drive has great sequential access times.

 

[Milhouse]

Regarding spindle speeds, if you want a quiet box I'd take 5400 over 7200 every day. I built two HP N36L's, one with 4x 7200RPM 1TB Samsung disks, and a second with 4x 5400RPM 2TB Samsung disks and the amount of "resonance" and vibration (and thus, noise) from the 5400RPM-based unit was markedly lower than the unit built with 7200RPM disks.