themagictractor
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2017
- Messages
- 11
Hi all,
I'm in need of a NAS for photo/video storage and was initially planning on buying a pre-built NAS, but after a bit of research found I can repurpose my old PC as a NAS for substantially less money, and it'll be a fair bit more powerful using the magic of FreeNAS.
Before i jump in and go out and buy the bits i'll need I just wanted to double check that this'll all work as anticipated, and if anyone could answer any queries i have thatd be wonderful.
My old PC has an i7 2600/16gb of ram, and the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3. I plan to sell my old graphics card since i figure i wont need it for this build, buy a small case (a Corsair 100R because it has 4 3.5" bays, is fairly small, affordable and understated), a 450w Gold 80+ PSU because my old 750w PSU is very sketchy and either a decent air cooler or a cheap liquid cooled solution for the i7 because it was just running off a stock cooler its whole life.
All up this shouldn't cost me more then $300 to get set up, which I've found is a lot cheaper then buying a pre-built NAS from brands like Synology or QNAP.
Now for my questions;
1) I want to be able to enable 10GbE speeds on this NAS. I've read online and on these forums and people are saying i'll need a 10GbE card both in my current PC and in this NAS PC in order to enable these speeds. The card's ive found which are the most affordable and most well mentioned are the Intel X540-T2 and the Chelsio T420-CR. If I buy two of these, stick one into the PCI-e 2.0 port on the old PC and one in the PCI-e 3.0 port on my new PC and then connect em with a CAT7 cable will I get 10GbE speeds? Or is there something more that needs to be done (other then enabling 10GbE speeds in the FreeNAS settings?)
From what I gather in order to be able to access the files at these speeds wirelessly or through the network i'll also need a 10GbE switch and router, but if i just want to connect it from my computer to the NAS directly through a cable, is this doable?
2) I also have a new Macbook Pro 15" (with the tb3 ports) and was wondering if there exists an adapter to be able to plug that into my NAS as well (as I do video editing in FCP) and acheive the full 10GbE speeds. I've found some for TB2, i'm assuming these are also useable with TB3?
3) Is there a plugin which will allow me to sync certain folders directly to Google Drive for cloud backup?
4) If I run RAID1 off two 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives, and then in a years time or so add another 2, is it fairly straightforward to get FreeNAS to recognize the drive change, and subsequently add more storage seamlessly? (stupid question probably but I literally have zero experience with NAS)
5) And lastly, is what I presented above feasible or am I really just better off getting something pre-built which has proprietary software on it thats user friendly? I love the idea of being able to re-use my old computer for this purpose and I'm eager to learn about more the backend side of things instead of just letting software do the job for me, but I don't know if i'm in way over my head here.
Thank you very much for reading, any help would be greatly appreciated
I'm in need of a NAS for photo/video storage and was initially planning on buying a pre-built NAS, but after a bit of research found I can repurpose my old PC as a NAS for substantially less money, and it'll be a fair bit more powerful using the magic of FreeNAS.
Before i jump in and go out and buy the bits i'll need I just wanted to double check that this'll all work as anticipated, and if anyone could answer any queries i have thatd be wonderful.
My old PC has an i7 2600/16gb of ram, and the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3. I plan to sell my old graphics card since i figure i wont need it for this build, buy a small case (a Corsair 100R because it has 4 3.5" bays, is fairly small, affordable and understated), a 450w Gold 80+ PSU because my old 750w PSU is very sketchy and either a decent air cooler or a cheap liquid cooled solution for the i7 because it was just running off a stock cooler its whole life.
All up this shouldn't cost me more then $300 to get set up, which I've found is a lot cheaper then buying a pre-built NAS from brands like Synology or QNAP.
Now for my questions;
1) I want to be able to enable 10GbE speeds on this NAS. I've read online and on these forums and people are saying i'll need a 10GbE card both in my current PC and in this NAS PC in order to enable these speeds. The card's ive found which are the most affordable and most well mentioned are the Intel X540-T2 and the Chelsio T420-CR. If I buy two of these, stick one into the PCI-e 2.0 port on the old PC and one in the PCI-e 3.0 port on my new PC and then connect em with a CAT7 cable will I get 10GbE speeds? Or is there something more that needs to be done (other then enabling 10GbE speeds in the FreeNAS settings?)
From what I gather in order to be able to access the files at these speeds wirelessly or through the network i'll also need a 10GbE switch and router, but if i just want to connect it from my computer to the NAS directly through a cable, is this doable?
2) I also have a new Macbook Pro 15" (with the tb3 ports) and was wondering if there exists an adapter to be able to plug that into my NAS as well (as I do video editing in FCP) and acheive the full 10GbE speeds. I've found some for TB2, i'm assuming these are also useable with TB3?
3) Is there a plugin which will allow me to sync certain folders directly to Google Drive for cloud backup?
4) If I run RAID1 off two 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives, and then in a years time or so add another 2, is it fairly straightforward to get FreeNAS to recognize the drive change, and subsequently add more storage seamlessly? (stupid question probably but I literally have zero experience with NAS)
5) And lastly, is what I presented above feasible or am I really just better off getting something pre-built which has proprietary software on it thats user friendly? I love the idea of being able to re-use my old computer for this purpose and I'm eager to learn about more the backend side of things instead of just letting software do the job for me, but I don't know if i'm in way over my head here.
Thank you very much for reading, any help would be greatly appreciated