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[CAH1982]

Im planning on building a Nas, to replace my very old Netgear ReadyNas Duo V1 (640GB Mirror Raid) and a Buffalo stand alone Nas (4TB), I do have a USB 6TB shared on a win10 computer aswell

So the plan was to use my old ATX case as its got loads of bays for drives, but current motherboard (broken) is a 2ghz AMD Athlon, the new hardware would be as follows

ASUS H110M-R Mother board (4sata ports)
8GB DDR4 Ram
i3-6100 cpu, Upgradable at some point
128gb Samsung Evo drive for boot (old spare)
For now 4 x 500gb hard drives, to practice on setting up, Eventually will add a couple of 8TB drives.
Use old PSU 650W but if needed swap for Quiet 650w PSU

I would be looking to add the below to the PCI-E 16x
LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9201-8i 9211-8i IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID +2x 8087 SATA

The Nas will generally be a file/media server, max lets say 3 uses at once. Current set up does cope/work, so the above should be a vast improvementwith the above, and hopefully some energy effieciency gained

So a couple of questions

1. Is the LSI SAS ok in the x16pci slot, all reading I've done suggests thats fine, Guessing anyfirmware updates would need to be done from windows?
2. TrueNAS Core or TrueNAS Scale, The scale seems to offer a fuller linux, and could run VMs
3. Any other advice?

 

[CAH1982]

Just been offered the bellow as well

Gigabyte B450M DS3H
CPU AMD Ryzen 3100
Geforce 710grx < Would probs have to be removed once installed to make way for the lSI SAS, or could this be used in other port at x4? would there be an noticable difference

 

[ChrisRJ]

Welcome to the forum.

Please have a look at the first couple if entries in the recommended readings in my signature. This will give a lot of background and very likely make you change your plans ;-)

 

[CAH1982]

Cheers,

I have read the hardware guides, and it seems intel is prefered over the Ryzens, but also notice allot of people have built systems based on this.

Im not looking to spend too much money, Im also using a Windows 10 PC with usb drives on SMB and that works fine.

So what do you think from the guilds would change my mind? Theres allot of hard ware and things to consider etc and I often seem to find one thing but then that means something else isnt compatible

 

[Lipsum Ipsum]

So what do you think from the guilds would change my mind? Theres allot of hard ware and things to consider etc and I often seem to find one thing but then that means something else isnt compatible

A lot of hardware can work, the question is just does it work well. Not necessarily specific to your build but in general, there's usually a quality/functionality/support difference between AMD consumer hardware and "server" grade hardware.

AMD consumer procs don't "officially" support ECC. AMD kind of just leaves the functionality there and lets the motherboard manufacturer enable and support it if they want. But it raises the cost to validate and support it, and it's a fairly niche feature for most people buying a system. They rather have a cheaper system than one that supports an option that they won't likely use.

The motherboard you mention also has a realtek nic. They aren't known to be the most reliable as a brand. That's not to say that Intel, Broadcom, et al can't also have issues. But generally speaking, there's a reason why you don't find Realtek nics on boards that are to be used in workstations, servers, etc as the primary adapter(s).

Similar things can be said for chipsets for SATA ports vs a dedicated HBA. Or consumer boards that relies on CPU power instead of doing it in dedicated hardware. Or lesser known hardware that might work ok using Windows, but hasn't been ported to FreeBSD or *nix, or just has incomplete/experimental functionality.

It really comes down to what your use is, how reliable of a system you want, and how safe you want your data.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Thanks @Lipsum Ipsum, that is a nice write-up IMHO.

There is one crucial thing in there that I would like to re-emphasize, because it tends to be misinterpreted or ignored. I am talking about what "working" or "working well" means. I do not mean this to change what was written above, but as a sort-of comment.

The point is that many people consider some level of initial success as "it works". In storage, however, that is the wrong approach. One can't be too paranoid really. Unless the data in question are not important, but that would beg the question why to bother ZFS in the first place. A NAS really works when 5 things have gone wrong and there was still no data lost.

This comes at a price. The first component is time for the learning curve. The second is that not all hardware is suitable.

When one accepts those two, the price to "win" is a system comparable to others where the license alone would cost at least a 5-digit figure (more likely 6 digits). I have come to ZFS from Novell NetWare 3.12 and 4.11 in the late 1990s, via Samba on Linux, and started with ZFS in about 2008(?).

What I always recommend to people who are new ZFS, is to not rush things. For comparison, when I built my current NAS about 2 years ago, I needed 2 months until I finally knew what I wanted (despite the many years spent on the subject already). So don't think of yourself as "slow" if it takes a month or more. It only means you are thorough .

 

[danb35]

For small home servers, I like the HPE MicroServers. The Gen8 can be found on eBay around US$300 with a Xeon CPU, has decent remote management capabilities, and is proper server-grade hardware. It's fairly compact, doesn't draw much power, and it's quiet. If you can deal with four disk bays, IMO, they're hard to beat for a small NAS.

 

[CAH1982]

Cheers Them HPE Microservers looks ideal, will just keep an eye out and for now use the above build for a win10 server with file sharing/rdp