Hello from Iowa

[Enkii]

First post should always be the introduction post right?;)

Hello from Iowa.

Figured I'd get off my lazy bum and build a home NAS for general storage/sharing needs. I had an old Pentium laying around but when I went to use it, it blew smoke out the rear

I've seen deals on newegg for those purpose built home NAS units but I never paid attention to the price. I couldn't believe it when I went looking, they want from $200 to $500 for some of the most basic units (not including hard drives, 512mb of DDR2 ram, Atom processors, etc).

After some searching and considering I was able to put together a simple system $339.95 shipped. Specs are as follows:

Intel i3-4130
Asus H81M-k Motherboard
Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 4GB DDR3 1600
Western Digital Green 2TB drive
Rosewill R363-M-BK case & 400w power supply

Definitely not a top end server but for my simple network hosting needs this machine is more than enough and it was a tad over the price for a decent diskless purpose built NAS unit.:)

 

[DJ9]

You might want to read up on the hardware requirements for FreeNAS.
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, you've already started off on a bad foot with that hardware...

 

[Knowltey]

Yeah, as the other two have pointed out you hardware doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for FreeNAS.

First things I see are that you have only half of the minimum required amount of RAM. Anything less than 8GB will be unstable and you risk losing your entire pool with no warning. 4GB is barely enough to run the operating system, much less all of the caching and RAM requirements of the other system processes that FreeNAS must perform.

Second is that you are not using a CPU, motherboard, or RAM that support ECC memory, those all need to be replaced with hardware that supports ECC.

I wouldn't expect your current build to last more than a couple of months before you wake up one morning and find that you've lost every single bit of your data. What you built isn't a NAS, it's a landmine.

 

[Enkii]

Thanks for the information all. Looks like freeNAS might not be the service based OS I desire, it appears to be designed more toward a heavy use/enterprise solution. Do you guys/gals have any recommendations for a lighter Linux based NAS OS that would be suitable for basic home use?



Thanks,

Enkii

 

[Knowltey]

Well it is more than suitable for home use, and I believe that's what most of us are using it for. It's just designed with data integrity in mind (You know, basically the whole point of having a NAS) so it is designed in mind with hardware that has the same purpose in mind with it. The hardware in question actually isn't a big deal either, in fact it very well could even end up being cheaper than what you got. Common hardware recommendation here is to use a G2020, a SuperMicro motherboard that is compatible with that processor, and then at least 8GB of ECC RAM. The G2020 is actually crazy cheap for what it is. The motherboards are average priced, and the RAM is only a bit more expensive than regular RAM so in the end it really balances out. So instead of ordering the i3 setup just get a build going that utilizes ECC instead and you should be golden, you may even end up saving money.

I have a build feedback thread I posted a while back in the hardware section: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/build-feedback-requested.16613/

I went with a G3220 which is a more up to date processor than the G2020, basically a newer version of it. It's slightly more expensive, but really only by a few dollars if I remember correctly. The motherboard that I sprung for was a bit on the pricier side of the SuperMicro boards that supported the processor I was wanting to put in my system, so you might be able to utilize a different motherboard with fine results as well and save money there. Then I went for 8GB of ECC RAM since my NAS only has 1TB of storage space in a mirrored vdev as it is so the minimum RAM is fine for my purposes.

Those three parts in my build came out to be just over 300 dollars, but as I outlined above there are various places where you can cut costs as well and could probably still bring the build out to be about even with what you are currently planning.

Also I'd highly recommend throwing in at least one more 1TB HDD into your build and configuring them in a RAID1 so that you at least have redundancy. Running only one disk means that if that disk has a hardware failure, and believe me it does happen more often than you would think, you lose everything, and I mean everything. If you have at least a RAID1 configuration if a disk goes bad you can replace it without losing everything as long as the other disk in the RAID doesn't also go bad before you have the chance to replace and fully resilver the disk

Also with RAM, if you have the option between a 1333 speed DIMM and a 1600 speed DIMM just go for the 1333 DIMM unless for whatever reason the 1600 is cheaper. You simply aren't going to notice the less than 1% performance difference that the extra speed imparts, especially in a file storage application such as a FreeNAS solution. In terms of RAM performance it's really the CAS that matters most, but that's usually pretty negligible in real world applications as well. DDR3 ECC RAM of at least 8GB in size is really all that you should be concerned with.

Also, you're going to hate that Rosewill case, I have one for a side server that I have that is running on a retail HP Pavilion desktop circa 2001 and I almost liked the case that the HP came in better than the Rosewill, and if you're at all familiar with how HP made their cases in 2001 than you know that's saying something about how crappy the Rosewill is.

Another option you can also look into if you want besides the G2020 or G3220 options i presented above is AMD, much of their "consumer grade" hardware does actually support ECC unlike how with Intel you basically have to go for server specific hardware. Just note that BSD and as an extent FreeNAS don't always like to play very well with AMD parts for whatever reason.

 

[cyberjock]

If you use linux primarily, why not just do an ext4 partition and throw your data on it and share it out via your favorite protocol? No need to add complexity to your situation...

ZFS needs ECC RAM, period. So whether you do ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris, you will still need ECC RAM for pool safety reasons.