Home Server ITX build

[inflikt]

Build Name: Atlas
Operating System: FreeNas or Nas4Free - still undecided. Nas4Free has the newer codebase but the FreeNAS extensions (transmission, couchpotato etc) look alot easier to setup.

CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 V3
Motherboard: ASRock E3C224D2I LGA1150
Chassis: U-nas NSC800 (8 bay, mini-itx)
Drives: 6-8 x 3tb NAS drives (mix of seagate NAS and WD Reds)
RAM: Kingston ValueRam 16GB PC3-10600 ECC
Add-in Cards: IBM 46M0831 ServeRAID M1015 SAS/ SATA Controller
Power Supply: Seasonic PSUSEA300M1U80G SS-300M1U Active PFC Mini 1U 300W
Other Bits: Maybe after-market HSF (Noctua NH-L9i Low Profile HSF)

Usage Profile: My main use will be to store my media (movies/tv shows) and serve to my intel haswell NUC running OpenElec. I would also like to setup a torrent service to run on this box as well. Im looking at couchpotato and sickbeard type things as well but these would be secondary.

Other information: What was going to be a cheap unraid build has escalated somewhat. I realise for what my usage a cheap, low-power unraid solution would meet my needs but im really keen on ZFS. Additionally, a 8 bay QNAP or Synology are around the $1500 mark when i can get the above for just under $1400 and would be vastly superior hardware wise.

I've done a fair amount of research but im really new to this kind of stuff. I would really like some thoughts on my build above and any extra advice you can give regarding setup, freeNAS vs NAS4Free etc.

Thanks,

Nate

 

[cchayre]

I gave the FreeNAS vs NAS4Free question some thought with my latest build. I've run NAS4Free in the past and it is decent. FreeNAS ultimately won out for a few big reasons---larger community, better doc, more flexibility (plugins), etc.

Some similarities with my hw build to yours, but I went i3 Haswell for the CPU---good price + ECC. I'm not doing any transcoding or anything else that I envision leveraging that much horsepower. Will let someone else with more time on FreeNAS speak to this aspect though.

Minus a hiccup with an RMA and only a short-time in "production," I'm happy with my ASRock E3C226D2I. Meets all of my needs and then-some. In retrospect I probably would have gone C224 to shave cost (since I don't really need SATA III). Memory I'm using is actually a pair of Crucial 8GB ECC sticks (16GB aggregate) and it's running fine---clean memtest and what-not. Not on official HCL yet though.

 

[DJABE]

Looks really nice!
I couldn't find anywhere ASRock Rack server boards - what a pity!