Greetings, and first FreeNAS build.

[Linkman]

Greetings! First post. Ready to put together my first FreeNAS build, currently searching the forums for recommendations, particularly on hard drive selection. Proposed hardware is in my signature, but to be complete...

Planning on using an existing Cooler Master CM-690 II Advanced mid-tower case, with a 4x3 hard drive expander cage replacing three of the external 5.25 bays. This case would ultimately be able to support 11 or 12 3.5 inch drives, though I am initially planning on six (6) 3TB drives in a RAIDZ2 config. Existing 500W PC Power & Cooling Silencer MkII power supply.

Planning on purchasing a Supermicro MBD-X10SL7-F motherboard, Intel Xeon E3-1241V3 Haswell CPU, and the 2x8GB Crucial ECC RAM kit mentioned in the hardware posts on the Supermicro boards.

Currently have two 3TB WD Red drives, was planning on one more 3TB Red drive, and then either three 3TB WD Greens, or three 3TB Seagate drives, so as not to have too homogeneous a drive pool.

Planning on archive storage of household media, pictures, ripped DVDs, etc., a backup destination for another one or possibly two household computer's home directories, and to run a couple Jails to play around basically. (I also have a Synology 2-bay NAS with 2 3TB WD Reds in RAID 1 that's my existing backup destination, and it will remain as a second backup for everything that's not media.)

Opinions? Any particular 3TB drives that stand out, that I should look at? Thanks!

 

[Bidule0hm]

I don't see anything wrong ;)

Just don't use 7200 RPM drives (they are power hungry and run hotter than the 5x00 RPM drives) unless you know what you're doing :)

Don't forget to use WDIDLE3 on the greens to avoid the LCC problem ;)

 

[Linkman]

Update... build in progress.
(0) Ran memtest over the weekend, I think a little overkill but due to getting busy I let it run for 33 hours with no errors reported.
(1) Using the info found on these forums, I've flashed the built-in LSI card on my X10SL7 to IT mode, version 16 (IPMI is fantastic, server boards rule! Mounted the ISO through IPMI from my desktop Ubuntu box, then used the IPMI interface to boot to EFI mode to flash the firmware from the mounted iso.)
(2) And then used an UltimateBoot CD on a flash drive to set the idle time out on the three WD Green drives I'm using from the default 8 secs to 300 seconds.
(3) Just to be safe, I checked the WD Red drives (WD30EFRX in my case) and found two had their idle time out was also set to default of 8 secs. So I changed that to 300 seconds as well. These were Reds manufactured in 4th quarter of 2013. Another Red manufactured in Dec 2014 was set to default of 300 seconds already.

FYI, the 1.05 version of WDIDLE3 found on UBCD 5.3.3 works on late model Green drives (WD30EZRX in my case) just fine.

Next up is to actually mount the drives, install FreeNAS, and begin the long HDD testing / burn-in process.