First time venturing into NAS.

[pirateghost]

Reduction in load times when accessing the programs? Or is that something that does not make a difference,?

You're accessing mostly web GUI type apps across a network. With the exception of some database intensive stuff or Minecraft (which runs in a jail on a normal pool just fine) I can't really think of any benefit the ssd or m.2 would provide for your jails. I often wonder why people are always asking about running jails and plugins off SSDs. I can't discern any difference between ssd and non ssd in a jail system. And I run some small databases and nodejs apps in my jails....

 

[danb35]

If one of the jails is for VirtualBox, having it on an SSD would make sense for better performance of the VMs.

 

[Joel.LM]

Well. Looks like I'm going to have to redo my build. I can't seem to find the ram in Canada so I would have to order from the states. Due to the nature of where I live the shipping cost will be almost double the price of the ram. Back to the drawing board. See what I can put together in an 1150 board.

 

[danb35]

I'm pretty sure crucial.com ships worldwide, and they guarantee compatibility.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Yep, ordered from France, no problem ;)

 

[Joel.LM]

Yeah. Not the problem, I'm sure they will ship. I live in the Yukon Territories, I seldom can get away with shipping under 80$ if I'm ordering out of the states.

 

[Kevin Horton]

Crucial does claim that they can ship Canadian orders via Canada Post. Did you get a shipping quote from them?

NewEgg's Canadian web site does ship from Canada for many items. Did you try them?

Good luck.

 

[Joel.LM]

Okay. First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to post a reply. You have been a lot of help. I haven't begun ordering parts yet but that will come soon enough. I do have a few follow up questions which I have done a search but was not able to find anything, now I'm sure I have overlooked something and someone will tell me to learn how to be better at the use of the search function but anyhow.

Is it necessary to RAID your drives. Are you able to do some sort of No RAID configuration. Now I know this may sound silly but hear me out. I know the reason people build NAS is for redundancy however losing half your capacity on a RAID 1 configuration is a turn off and raid 5 using a minimum of 3 drives and performance drop I believe? Again not only are you losing capacity your also losing out on drive bays. When your running a server with sensitive information that you can't afford to lose I can see where the trade off is worth it but do you think it's a worthy trade off for a media nas? On a media NAS I would think that realestate is maybe more important than redundancy? RAID 0 from what I have read reduces the life expectancy of your drives so again, slight turn off. Some of the articles I have read suggest that backing up your NAS to an external hard drive.

Again, I'm just seeing what you guys think. From a learning perspective I'd like to do some sort of raid configuration however the loss of realestate hurts.

 

[danb35]

It is absolutely possible to use FreeNAS without RAID by configuring each disk as its own volume. We don't tend to encourage that configuration, though. We assume the reason you're using a ZFS-based NAS OS, with the admittedly-high hardware requirements that entails, is because you care about your data and want to protect it.

There are a few counterpoints to consider: (1) disk space is cheap. Yes, you sacrifice some (usually on the order of 1/4 to 1/2) for redundancy, to protect your data, but in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't cost very much. (2) disks are big now--6 TB disks are quite affordable (on a $/TB basis, not significantly more expensive than 3-4 TB disks), and even 8-10 TB disks are available. (3) unless you're looking at many tens of terabytes of media storage, you can probably meet your needs with 4-6 suitably-sized disks, which really don't take much physical space at all.

One point I'll correct you on--a striped pool (which you call RAID0) won't result in any given disk failing any faster than it otherwise would, but it will shorten your average time to data loss. The reason for that is that when any single disk in the pool fails, your entire pool will fail.

 

[Joel.LM]

Okay, so if I choose to do a RAID 5 for a media NAS. What kind of performance drop can I expect? Will it have an impact on transcoding speeds? Having never played with any type of RAID what can I expect performance wise from a RAID 5 set up? Would I notice any impact on performance? Where would I notice it?

 

[danb35]

You would not have RAID5 in FreeNAS; you'd have RAIDZ1. Though similar, they aren't the same. And for a media server, it's unlikely you'd notice any difference in performance at all. Your gigabit network would be the bottleneck.