nightshade00013
Wizard
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Messages
- 1,258
Ok, now I think I understand more of what you are looking at.
No matter what the server will be loud (especially a 1U or 2U), they are not designed to sit in a bedroom or other area you want quiet so plan to run a long cable. They are loud because they move air to keep things cool. Turning the fans down just cooks the drives and internals. You could potentially dampen some of the sound with a cabinet or cover but it still needs full airflow.
The Dell you linked has a H700 SAS controller, it's raid and from what I can tell no crossflash so you will need to either hope that you can hook up the drives direct to the MoBo or sell the H700 and get something that can be flashed into IT mode. That is one of the issues with used stuff, you get it how they have it so you may have to make changes. The idea is to make as few as possible for the least cost possible in my book.
Even with dual power supplies you will want a UPS, two power supplies are worthless when the main lines go down. You could have ten power supplies for that matter, the only advantage that multiple power supplies gives is that if a power supply fails it will continue running.
Accessing from away from home is best done with a VPN, there is a tutorial to do it on the FreeNAS itself or if you have a router that has the horsepower it can be done there. A VPN should probably be something like OpenVPN, and if it's a Dlink or Linksys kind of router that has wifi among other things in a little box it's not a good candidate. If you are going to be out and about however you may still want to use one of your USB drives as the transfer speeds will be better than through the internet (this is because your home internet upload speed is the cap while you are on the go along with the upload/download speeds where you are at). A torrent client is no problem it's basically a click, install, add OpenVPN as a client and then get it running.
Remember that with 10 GBe you will also need an adapter for the computers that need the fast access and a switch that supports it. If you have been running off of USB drives Gigabit will still probably be better than what you have been using IMHO and you can always upgrade that part later on and get a little fancier. I would suggest getting something up and running for the pictures and such first.
With 8 drive bays I would look at 4TB drives and probably 8 in a RaidZ2 or RaidZ3 personally. It would give you around 12 to 16 TB of storage at around 500 to 600 MBps transfer on the pool. You could do mirrors as well to add more drives over time but you do lose some things with it vs a RaidZ2 or RaidZ3.
As far as testing things out and seeing how it works you can use the i7 system you talked about, just don't store ANYTHING on it that you don't mind flushing down the toilet at any moment. It's not too different from what I started learning with. It was an older AMD system that barely supported FreeNAS but it let me work through things and get an understanding of how to make it all work correctly. Then when funding came available I made a purchase here and a purchase there. At one point I had the MoBo I have now sitting on a wooden table with a PSU hooked up along with a drive attached and running as I didn't have the case yet. I was originally planning to build my own case but was due for shoulder surgery and wanted it done so I ended up with the Rosewill I linked above.
Anyway tinker around with what you have so you can get a feel for how it works and see if the setup will work for you. I would probably stripe a couple drives together for faster speed to begin with in testing since the pool will be much faster than a single drive. Then see how things work. It will be faster and more stable on a final system and during tinkering as I already said do not store anything on it that you can not lose completely, forever, in a pit at the bottom of the ocean.
No matter what the server will be loud (especially a 1U or 2U), they are not designed to sit in a bedroom or other area you want quiet so plan to run a long cable. They are loud because they move air to keep things cool. Turning the fans down just cooks the drives and internals. You could potentially dampen some of the sound with a cabinet or cover but it still needs full airflow.
The Dell you linked has a H700 SAS controller, it's raid and from what I can tell no crossflash so you will need to either hope that you can hook up the drives direct to the MoBo or sell the H700 and get something that can be flashed into IT mode. That is one of the issues with used stuff, you get it how they have it so you may have to make changes. The idea is to make as few as possible for the least cost possible in my book.
Even with dual power supplies you will want a UPS, two power supplies are worthless when the main lines go down. You could have ten power supplies for that matter, the only advantage that multiple power supplies gives is that if a power supply fails it will continue running.
Accessing from away from home is best done with a VPN, there is a tutorial to do it on the FreeNAS itself or if you have a router that has the horsepower it can be done there. A VPN should probably be something like OpenVPN, and if it's a Dlink or Linksys kind of router that has wifi among other things in a little box it's not a good candidate. If you are going to be out and about however you may still want to use one of your USB drives as the transfer speeds will be better than through the internet (this is because your home internet upload speed is the cap while you are on the go along with the upload/download speeds where you are at). A torrent client is no problem it's basically a click, install, add OpenVPN as a client and then get it running.
Remember that with 10 GBe you will also need an adapter for the computers that need the fast access and a switch that supports it. If you have been running off of USB drives Gigabit will still probably be better than what you have been using IMHO and you can always upgrade that part later on and get a little fancier. I would suggest getting something up and running for the pictures and such first.
With 8 drive bays I would look at 4TB drives and probably 8 in a RaidZ2 or RaidZ3 personally. It would give you around 12 to 16 TB of storage at around 500 to 600 MBps transfer on the pool. You could do mirrors as well to add more drives over time but you do lose some things with it vs a RaidZ2 or RaidZ3.
As far as testing things out and seeing how it works you can use the i7 system you talked about, just don't store ANYTHING on it that you don't mind flushing down the toilet at any moment. It's not too different from what I started learning with. It was an older AMD system that barely supported FreeNAS but it let me work through things and get an understanding of how to make it all work correctly. Then when funding came available I made a purchase here and a purchase there. At one point I had the MoBo I have now sitting on a wooden table with a PSU hooked up along with a drive attached and running as I didn't have the case yet. I was originally planning to build my own case but was due for shoulder surgery and wanted it done so I ended up with the Rosewill I linked above.
Anyway tinker around with what you have so you can get a feel for how it works and see if the setup will work for you. I would probably stripe a couple drives together for faster speed to begin with in testing since the pool will be much faster than a single drive. Then see how things work. It will be faster and more stable on a final system and during tinkering as I already said do not store anything on it that you can not lose completely, forever, in a pit at the bottom of the ocean.
