Hello Everyone

[Haysden Smart]

I would like to introduce myself and say a big than you to everyone on the forum. I have been a long time user of FreeNAS and have spent allot of time going through the forums for additional support. Thankfully I have not had to ask for any additional support. I do believe that is about to change though.

I have recently setup a new SOHO FreeNAS;
Intel S2600CS2 Motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2603 CPU (Need a second one and possibly faster in future upgrade)
24GB Registered ECC 1333Mhz RAM
1 by LSI 9122 (Intel M1015 Flashed to IT Mode) Had to use UEFI Shell to flash as I do not have a motherboard that supports the DOS sas2flash application
8 by WD RED NAS 2TB Disks running Z1 4x2x2TB configuration for main Data Volume (DataVolume1)
2 by Kingston V300 240GB SSD's running Striped configuration for Plugins/Jails Store (Plugins)
1 by Kingston V300 240GB SSD for DataVolume 1 Read Cache
2 x Intel Dual 1000MBit NIC in 1 Link Aggregation

Running Home Server with PMS (Plex Media Server), SickRage and Transmission
Running Work File Server, hoping to get Domain Controller working soon. Prooving to be a little trickier than expected. (working progress)

 

[BigDave]

Welcome to the forums M8

 

[Haysden Smart]

I would have started with Z2, however as 4 disks came out another older freenas, i just extended with a further 4 disks.
I am currently running RSYNC to backup, then I will change to Z2 and restore.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Darren Myers]

Hey and welcome to the forums, glad youre enjoying plex,sickrage, and transmission. Plex and sickrage are my favorites, i would shoot for a higher Ghz CPU and more RAM, can never have enough RAM specially when running multiple plugins

 

[Haysden Smart]

Thanks for your replies guys, it is always good to have input from other FreeNas users.

After upgrading from my old machine that was a a hack together and considered a bit of a "no no". AMD FX 4 Core running on ASUS consumer motherboard with 32GB Non ECC DDR3 Ram. I can see why everyone recommends server hardware.

My new FreeNAS has been running very nicely for over 2 weeks now with absolutely no hiccups and everything appears to be operating smoother than ever. Even know I am running less RAM and a slower CPU.

 

[Haysden Smart]

upgraded to 64GB of Kingston ECC RAM today (8xKVR1333D3D4R9/8G) and now my drives are hardly ever accessed. All DLNA info and file lists reside in RAM or the 250GB SSD Read Cache drive.

 

[Haysden Smart]

I have just recently upgraded to 64GB ECC ram and now purchased 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU's.

Probably a bit of overkill for a FreeNas set-up. However I am running FreeNas 9.3 with plex, Transmission and sickrage plugins, plus a Virtually jail running FreePBX, 2 Web servers and a windows small business server 2008.

Will let everyone know how it goes.