Freenas build for small office

[Imads]

Hey all
First post here, and new to building Nas

Need to build a shared drive for data access by roughly 40-50, for non critical storage

My best bet is a NAS system running freenas. Main goal shared storage and file sharing - mostly ai and psd files

Im fairly decent at building systems though never have done a NAS before

Couple of quick queries

• Is there a better alternative to drive share instead of nas
• Do i need a network card?
• Can i run Freenas without raid - basically as Jbod - dont wanna lose disk space with raid
• Do let me know if the below list seems fine and if the number of accesses would be fine

Below is the parts list,

• MSI B450-A PRO/ Asrock X370 Pro4/ ASUS PRIME X370-PRO - am4 mobo
• Amd APU 2200g
• Corsair lpx 16GB DDR4 Ram 2400 x2
• Corsair RM1000x - ( overkill but need sata cables and this one is on sale, than lesser wattage psu have lesser sata cables and I rather not go for splitters, convertors )
• Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro 7200RPM x4
• Crucial 120GB BX500 SATA III 2.5 -
• NZXT H440 - for the drive bays -

Aware of the ecc ram and intel recommendations for freenas systems, though would still want to go with amd and non ecc - parts be cheaper here. Can move to intel if recommended but honestly it's much cheaper and more cores, threads etc. Have researched alot on the forum and non ecc ram and amd cpu check out

Usage wise - will be light usage - mostly 8-10 people at max using it at a time,

Let me know, any help be appreciated

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

If you don't want RAID, don't care about data security, don't want ECC RAM, have no interest in following the hardware best practices, well, it's probably best if you don't FreeNAS. No hard feelings. It isn't right for everyone. I hope you find a platform that meets your needs.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Is there a better alternative to drive share instead of nas

Well, there are many nas options out there. FreeNAS happens to be what folks on this forum use. I'm not using mine for nearly the number of users as you but there are plenty of people on the forums that do and can help with that.

Do i need a network card?

If your motherboard has an NIC built in, then no. I will say that for 1Gbe NICs the community hear strongly leans Intel and away from Realtek etc due to significantly better reliability and performance. For your use case you may need 10Gbe if you have a lot of concurrent users else you'll be too tightly network bound. You may like the Primer on 10Gbe.

Can i run Freenas without raid - basically as Jbod - don't wanna lose disk space with raid

This is an interesting question. On the one hand, yes you absolutely can use FreeNAS without any sort of parity in a disk array. FreeNAS works happily with stripes, mirrors, and RAIDZ1|2|3. Though, you should keep one thing in mind as you browse these forums and interact with the community. FreeNAS was built around data integrity and the community takes that to heart. Building a NAS box with FreeNAS without utilizing either Mirrors or RAIDZ1|2|3 would be a poor use of FreeNAS. If you put any data on your NAS that you care about you're going to want some kind of parity. So yes, you can. If you have important data you can't afford to lose you'd be making a poor choice from the perspective of data integrity. The community will strongly urge you to use design for sort of parity in your vdevs.

MSI B450-A PRO/ Asrock X370 Pro4/ ASUS PRIME X370-PRO - am4 mobo

Unfortunately, these boards are not suited for FreeNAS. For one, they have a lot of features that are not useful in a NAS; think onboard audio etc. Additionally, these boards are not designed for the long-term reliability of server boards. The built-in NICs on these boards are all Realtek; a bad idea with FreeNAS. Finally, these chipsets do not support ECC memory. This goes back to using FreeNAS for data integrity. FreeNAS will happily take whatever comes out of memory and put it onto disk. If your memory corrupted some bits silently your data and any backups of your data so affected are forever tainted. ECC memory protects you from that and these boards don't support it. There are some debates online about the importance of ECC memory; but the community here typically strongly encourages it.

Check out the hardware recommendation guide for useful tips on motherboard choice.

Amd APU 2200g

Most folks go intel; but there are AMD builds.

Corsair lpx 16GB DDR4 Ram 2400 x2

FreeNAS benefits from LOTS of memory. Start with at least 8GB and buy DIMMs that are the max size supported by your board so that over time you can max out the board.

Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro 7200RPM x4

If you go with RAIDZ2 you're going to have 8TB of storage but you shouldn't really consume more than 80% of that as doing so will have negative consequences on performance. However, you can grow your pools by adding more vdevs later. Check out an explanation of vdevs etc here.

Aware of the ecc ram and intel recommendations for freenas systems, though would still want to go with amd and non ecc - parts be cheaper here. Can move to intel if recommended but honestly it's much cheaper and more cores, threads etc. Have researched a lot on the forum and non ecc ram and amd cpu check out

Usage wise - will be light usage - mostly 8-10 people at max using it at a time,

Yes, you certainly can build a system without ECC memory. If money is your reason for doing so I would suggest you buy used. You can get a great x10 series supermicro board and cpu off of ebay and save enough money to justify bumping up to ECC. Some of the community's most experienced and long-term uses of FreeNAS often purchase used equipment.

So, the build you outlined is not ideal for FreeNAS. If you're not interested in data integrity perhaps another NAS solution might be better for you. If you or your users do care about data integrity the community here is happy to help zero in on affordable and appropriate hardware.

 

[DQQ]

Hey all
First post here, and new to building Nas

Need to build a shared drive for data access by roughly 40-50, for non critical storage

My best bet is a NAS system running freenas. Main goal shared storage and file sharing - mostly ai and psd files

Im fairly decent at building systems though never have done a NAS before



Couple of quick queries

• Is there a better alternative to drive share instead of nas
• Do i need a network card?
• Can i run Freenas without raid - basically as Jbod - don't wanna lose disk space with raid
• Do let me know if the below list seems fine and if the number of accesses would be fine

I'm extremely new to FreeNAS (literally built my first FreeNAS system yesterday), so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I don't think FreeNAS is what you're looking for. You're basically asking for advice with a using a product but ignoring 90% of its features. You might be better off with just a simple *nix box running Samba (look up OpenMediaVault), or if you have spare Windows licenses, just do a simple network share.

Hows the Internet speed at this office? Would it make better sense to just get some kind of cloud storage and share over the Internet and let storage be someone else's problem?

If you're restricted to a server on your LAN, I would highly recommend to embrace a NAS with some fault tolerance like parity and ECC, it sounds like this is some kind of an office/studio environment, so you certainly have some concern for uptime? Safety features are like seat belts, you don't really need one until you're in an accident.

• MSI B450-A PRO/ Asrock X370 Pro4/ ASUS PRIME X370-PRO - am4 mobo
• Amd APU 2200g
• Corsair lpx 16GB DDR4 Ram 2400 x2
• Corsair RM1000x - ( overkill but need sata cables and this one is on sale, than lesser wattage psu have lesser sata cables and I rather not go for splitters, convertors )
• Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro 7200RPM x4
• Crucial 120GB BX500 SATA III 2.5 -
• NZXT H440 - for the drive bays -

Aware of the ecc ram and intel recommendations for freenas systems, though would still want to go with amd and non ecc - parts be cheaper here. Can move to intel if recommended but honestly it's much cheaper and more cores, threads etc. Have researched a lot on the forum and non ecc ram and amd cpu check out

Have you purchased any of the parts you've listed? If not, I think you can still piece together a FreeNAS capable build with ECC.

I've been looking at budget hardware options recently, and I found out that all Ryzen CPUs support ECC, you just have to find a motherboard that supports it in the BIOS, they're not "certified", but it'll run. In fact, Asrock X370s like the one you're considering are officially confirmed to support ECC on Linux, I'm unsure of *BSD and Windows support, but it doesn't hurt to try. You can always try another NAS OS like OpenMediaVault.

Newegg is selling 16GB sticks of ECC memory for $120 right now, and it's not that much more expensive than non ECC sticks. You will have to pick a new CPU though, AM4 APUs (G nomenclature) do not support ECC.

So just looking at your list, you can

• Choose a 1st gen Ryzen instead, maybe even one with more cores/threads. (Ryzen 1200 is only $3 more than a 2200G)
• Cut out the H440 for a cheaper case like the Antec NSK4100 ($50), with slots for 6x 3.5 drives
• Get a cheaper PSU like a RM550x (still 80+ Gold, still modular, half the cost), and just order an additional Corsair 4x Sata PSU cable.
• Get 6x 4TB WD Reds instead of 4x 4TB IW Pros for the same price, not only are they cheaper, but they're more suited for NAS usage, and you can now do a RaidZ2 with the same capacity as your list, or you can do RaidZ1 with an extra 4TB of storage.
• Cut out the SSD for a USB drive as boot media, FreeNAS loads the OS into RAM after boot anyways, so if you're trying to cut corners, cut out the SSD.
• Whatever money left over, you can put it towards an AMD CPU(not APU) and ECC memory.

You won't be able to use a monitor, but perhaps you have an old GPU laying around somewhere, use it during the install and then remove it to run FreeNAS headless once you have it installed. I believe there's also an option to install FreeNAS headless, but judging by your technical level, that might be a bit challenging.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hey @DQQ, great to see someone else new to FreeNAS and as quickly addicted as I am! Couple of thoughts on the above some folks may find useful.

Cut out the H440 for a cheaper case like the Antec NSK4100 ($50), with slots for 6x 3.5 drives

A cheap case with fewer bays is a great idea where money is really tight and you're sure you won't need more drives in the future. If you think your storage will grow you can save money long-term by going with a case that is 12-drive capable.

you can do RaidZ1 with an extra 4TB of storage.

I think it is worth noting the dangers of using RAIDZ1. I'm no expert on this but I can provide links from folks who know more than I do. There is certainly debate out there in the internet, but it is a thing to keep in mind. You should be keeping backups anyway. Everyone keeps backups, right? Right?

You won't be able to use a monitor, but perhaps you have an old GPU laying around somewhere, use it during the install and then remove it to run FreeNAS headless once you have it installed. I believe there's also an option to install FreeNAS headless, but judging by your technical level, that might be a bit challenging.

Many boards have built-in basic video support via a Matrox G200 or similar such as the x9, x10 and x11 line of supermicro boards. You can plug in a VGA monitor during the install process and once that is all set you use a Web GUI to set configure your system via another computer. You shouldn't need a graphics card whatsoever to accomplish the install and setup.

 

[DQQ]

Hey @DQQ, great to see someone else new to FreeNAS and as quickly addicted as I am! Couple of thoughts on the above some folks may find useful.

words.

Ahh thanks! I'm not sure if I'm addicted just yet, but so far I'm enjoy reading the documentation; as someone coming over from the *nix side, it's kind of strange(but nice!) to have official documentation instead of a collection of bookmarked tutorials.

I'm a bit pedantic so I'll just add that my suggestions to the OP was purely out of his concern given their budget/hardware preference, he/she will not be looking at server grade hardware for onboard graphics, and they'll probably want to maximize their storage potential with parity, if they will even give up on the JBOD idea at all. I'm not sure what "non critical" storage means, but if they're already doing backups and/or does not care about data security, then I believe Z1/R5 is a better arrangement for uptime. That being said, reading other people's stories about rebuilding Z1/R5(Yikes!) scared me into doing Z2 for my recent build.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

I'm a bit pedantic so I'll just add that my suggestions to the OP was purely out of his concern given their budget/hardware preference, he/she will not be looking at server grade hardware for onboard graphics, and they'll probably want to maximize their storage potential with parity, if they will even give up on the JBOD idea at all.

I have a lot of respect for that approach. I believe the OP could likely find server-grade parts for the same price or only slightly more (especially if buying used), but the prerogative is theirs. Take my comments above as educational for the OP just so they, or anyone else reading, has a good understanding of the choices they are making.

I think our community is well-served by posts like yours which respects the OP's situation and different needs and preferences. FreeNAS isn't for everyone and for those who choose this route not everyone has the funds or access to the same products some of us do. It does empower these users to help them understand the tradeoffs from the choices they make.

 

[file_haver]

I have no experience using freenas in a situation where more than a couple people access the NAS so i will solely address the question of JBOD:

Ive been running FreeNAS since 2010. Until 2013 I ran it on a Pentium 4 Sony VAIO with a bunch of random drives stuck in a JBOD. I never had a drive failure in that time. I had made another JBOD setup a few years ago when I only had a couple drives i could work with and needed to maximize storage.

Would I do it again despite never having a drive problem in that time? No, because even for non critical data it only takes a single drive to screw up the whole thing.

If the data truly is disposable and it just needs a place to sit, sure use JBOD. If you can afford that data all going *poof* if one drive screws up then by all means go ahead. You just need to be aware that the death of a single drive means you start all over, even if all the other disks are fine.

I have used FreeNAS on Intel Celeron & Pentium CPU's from 2011-2013 extensively and these are fine CPUs for the job. I would pick them over AMD personally but it's ultimately up to you. Personally i know it's very easy and cheap to get an older Xeon (also 2010-2013 era) that will use ECC and that could save you some good money too. The only time I've found a Celeron or Pentium doesn't cut it is when i have to do Plex transcoding and Plex transcoding is the single reason I use a more powerful CPU. But even the fact that I was able to use a Pentium 4 for home file server use up until about 6 years ago should prove not a lot of CPU power is needed. Then again I never tried to have more than a couple people access the server at a time and you may end up finding you benefit from setting your SSD to be a cache for the JBOD and might benefit from more CPU power. I really don't know. But i have a feeling you may be better suited by buying an older Xeon server and loading it with your drives. It wouldnt cost more on the hardware side of things, thats for sure.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

If the data truly is disposable and it just needs a place to sit, sure use JBOD. If you can afford that data all going *poof* if one drive screws up then by all means go ahead. You just need to be aware that the death of a single drive means you start all over, even if all the other disks are fine.

Hmm, perhaps the term was misunderstood? I was referring to a chassis which has no main board and consists mostly of drives, sas expander, psi, and backplane. In this scenario you can hook a freenas server to this other chassis via sas hba and control all of the disks through freenas. You can set up mirrored vdevs or raidz vdevs using those drives and thus not lose all of your data if one dies. You only lose all of your data it one dies if you use single disk vdevs.

There have been reported issues using esata or usb for this purpose as they can affect t the OS's ability to control disks and manage the pool.

 

[file_haver]

Hmm, perhaps the term was misunderstood? I was referring to a chassis which has no main board and consists mostly of drives, sas expander, psi, and backplane. In this scenario you can hook a freenas server to this other chassis via sas hba and control all of the disks through freenas. You can set up mirrored vdevs or raidz vdevs using those drives and thus not lose all of your data if one dies. You only lose all of your data it one dies if you use single disk vdevs.

There have been reported issues using esata or usb for this purpose as they can affect t the OS's ability to control disks and manage the pool.

That's definitely a lot better than i was imagining.

 

[Imads]

Woah... Ok thats alot to digest.

Thank you all for taking the time out to respond to this, clearly needed some schooling. helped me understand NAS much better.


Though let me start from the beginning to better explain context


Aim of the build is to primarily go from external 2x7-8 HDDs to a singular location and file sharing without too having to look into it too much. To be used by Mac and windows

- Start small ( 16 - 20 tb) and then add drives over time ( hence the large case and the cores and the sata cable requirements)


Initial thought was to do a Freenas build and maybe go for parity using recommended parts list

Though supermicro boards are not available at all in my region ( India), the ones available are for 3x the price of the boards ive put up,

hence the asus boards that support ecc. ECC ram is also 2x ( getting samsung 8gb ecc for the price of 16gb non ecc). Definately aiming to go atleast 16 or 32 if possible

Wouldve gone second hand if it was for personal use, but this will be used by my company

As for the psu - the 1000rm is the almost the same price as the 550, instead of buying addon power, figured id utilize the sale

Any particular reason for CPU over APU - cost wise its the same here.


The part list i put up was keeping all the above in mind. though for sure have changed from JBOD to Raid 5


The above points as i see it leave me with 4 options

1) Prebuilt system - Synology, etc
2) Freenas build with consumer grade parts AMD( can go for intel, but Afaik ecc support is limited) + maybe try to squeze in ECC ram
3) Freenas build with the server grade parts - which to be honest would be a much more expensive build, think atleast 50%-60% more
4) Network share off windows - even i dont think this is a good idea


I agree, slightly lost here. . Nudge in the right direction will be appreciated

Though knowing the details mentioned in this post - what do you guys recommend. I am open to other nas software, or other non nas options as well

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Glad you stuck with us. :)

I agree, slightly lost here. . Nudge in the right direction will be appreciated

It sounds to me like FreeNAS can serve your needs. Whether you use FreeNAS or not if you use any ZFS solution you'll want to go with ECC memory, if you can. If you plan to use the system as an always-on server to provide services to many users you'll want to go with parts designed for that purpose, if you can. (think server motherboard). If you do not use RAIDZ or mirroring you're setting yourself up to either lose data when a disk fails or be forced to restore from backup. If you're not able to use ECC memory, a server-grade motherboard, and mirroring|RAIDZ then perhaps another NAS option may be better for you. I do not know enough about other options to make a good suggestion for you.

 

[DQQ]

I have no experience using freenas in a situation where more than a couple people access the NAS so i will solely address the question of JBOD:
If the data truly is disposable and it just needs a place to sit, sure use JBOD. If you can afford that data all going *poof* if one drive screws up then by all means go ahead. You just need to be aware that the death of a single drive means you start all over, even if all the other disks are fine.

I thought one of the advantage of JBOD over striping was the ability to pull data off of the remaining functioning drives? As long as the data is stored entirely in a remaining functioning drive.

Woah... Ok thats a lot to digest.
Though let me start from the beginning to better explain context

Ahhh, I didn't realize the prices differed so greatly across regions, that is definitely a tough one; but to second @PhiloEpisteme , I think you can still stick with FreeNAS.

I think if you were trying to cut cost, i would prioritize having enough disks for RaidZ2 (2 disk parity) over ECC, I believe bit flips that could affect data write is more rare than disk failures. If you start googling FreeNAS and ECC, you can find tons and tons of disagreement about this, and while I would recommend reaching for ECC memory, again, given your budgetary concerns, I would rather have a RaidZ2 without ECC than a non parity with ECC.