How much money have you sunk into your FreeNAS project?

[joeschmuck]

So I thought I'd start an Off-Topic thread about how much money folks have been sinking into their FreeNAS projects. I thought about this when I almost came up against a wall and thought I'd be purchasing another CPU and MB and I thought, holy cow I have spent a lot of money for a NAS.

2+ years ago I was looking for a faster NAS and I couldn't justify spending $600+ dollars on a new NAS plus the hard drives. This FreeNAS project looked like a great opportunity to take my spare parts [and I have a lot of them] and put them to good use.

I started with an old MB and my E8500 CPU, a very good quality PSU, 4GB RAM, well I had everything except the hard drives. I purchased 4 Samsung 2TB drives for about $100 each so my total initial cost is $400.

Next I wanted to upgrade the MB so I could make use of other RAM I had so I could run 8GB and there goes another $90.00. Total now is $490.

Well now I see the error of my ways and the WD Red comes out. I grab 4 drives because they were on sale for $130 each, $520 more to my total and I'm at $1010.

So I wanted to get the RAIDZ1 proper and I bought another WD Red 2TB drive upping my drive count to 5 drives, this time it only cost $115. Grand total is 1125.

Bought a pair of Intel NIC cards for a total of $60. Lots of testing but in the end they didn't offer any improvement over my RealTek NICs on the MBs, likely because I have a good CPU. Well I now have a pair of NICs should I need them. Total cost is $1185.

And then I wanted to increase my RAM for two reasons, I thought I could upgrade my main computer from 24GB to 32GB RAM and steel the old RAM for the FreeNAS machine bumping it up from 8GB to 16GB. Well the new RAM cost me $144 and the joke is, my CPU can only handle 24GB RAM so there was no upgrade really. I swapped the RAM around, have a pair of extra new RAM sticks, and upgraded the FreeNAS machine. And unfortunately as I just found out today, the RAM will not run at it's rated speeds on the older MB, but it will run at a slightly slower speed. So even though I looks like I bought the RAM for my main computer, really it was for me to upgrade the FreeNAS computer. Cost total is now up to $1329. (This may be an unfair cost increase but I would not have done it unless I needed the RAM for the FreeNAS box)

Lastly I ordered one more WD Red 2TB drive for $115 so I could make my system a 6 drive RAIDZ2 configuration.

Grand Total: $1444.00 and this does not take into account any other items related to the project like buying a RAM Drive for faster compiling when I was active in version 8.0.0 thought 8.0.4. I have had a lot of fun here and if I could take it all back, I wouldn't. My only way to have saved a good chunk of my money would have been if the WD Red drives were available when I started into this project.

I forgot to add in the UPS, add $130. Total is now $1574.00.

So, if you wanted to post your story or just what you paid, please do so, I'd be curious to see how other folks did.

Cheers!

 

[ProtoSD]

I'll have to go back and itemize later, but I'm up around the same amount $1400, and that was before the Thailand hard drive disaster when I got my drives for about $89 each. I also upgraded my RAM from 4GB to 8GB and that was about another $170. None of this includes the UPS.

$224 Supermicro X7SPA-H Motherboard
$300 (4x Samsung) 2TB disks
$170 (2x Hitachi) 2TB disks
$70 4GB SO-DIMM DDR2 RAM
$180 8GB SO-DIMM DDR2 RAM
$150 Lian-Li PC-Q08A Silver Case
$50 160w PicoPSU
$50 160w AC-DC Power adapter
$36 6x Right angle snap-on SATA cables
$5 USB header to USB connector to connect USB flash drive inside case.

EDIT: So adding up the list its just over $1200, but it seems like I'm missing something.

BOTH Hitachi drives had to be RMA'd

 

[hervon]

I went to the FreeNAS route partly become I'm a cheap bastard. I'm also a do-it-yourself guy and available NAS (QNAP, Synology, etc) on the market were either to expensive or did not suit my needs.

So I built the system bellow for 285$ without drives. Bought 3x2tb drive for RAIDZ1 + 1 spare @ 100 $ each for a total of 685$.

I know I lack a few features like a UPS and ECC RAM but so far I'm happy with my setup thanks to the FREENAS project and the community!

 

[sysfu]

I scored an HP Microserver N36L for cheap, around $230 IIRC, stuffed it with $70 ECC 8GB ram, then utilized 4 existing samsung ecogreen 750GB sata drives for a raidz1-0 setup. Don't know how much I paid for those as I acquired them over the years. Add a $20 startech sata trayless 5.25 drive bay, plus another $90 2TB Samsung ecogreen for backup so probably right around $500.

Next upgrades are some 3TB WD Reds, UPS, and maybe an Intel NIC.

 

[jgreco]

Pfft. Lightweights.

$1200 Supermicro CSE-846BE26-R920B
$ 200 Misc brackets/parts/heatsinks/etc
$ 700 Supermicro X9DR7-TF+
$ 500 4 x M393B2G70BH0-CK0 16GB ECC 1600MHz (temporary)
$ 300 Intel E5-2609 (temporary)
$ 75 IBM ServeRAID M1015 (from eBay!)
$ 100 Misc SFF8087 cables
$ 200 2 x 120GB SATA SSD (boot - see note)
$ 200 240GB SATA SSD (L2ARC or perhaps scratch)
-----
$3475

Now the thing is that this is actually going to be an ESXi box, so some of the parts selection is not strictly relevant for a FreeNAS deployment, such as the RAID boot SSD's. The memory is also going to be expanded beyond 64GB and the CPU that's in there is mainly just to play - deployments around here can take more than six months and I'm kind of hoping that the E5 Ivy's, supposedly to head out towards 10- and 12-core, cause some downward price pressure on the 8-cores. Adding two 8-cores and another 192GB of RAM might only cost another $4000 by then But I expect that the FreeNAS VM will resemble the current hardware configuration so it's probably fair to exclude that.

Seems like a lot until you look at what vendors are selling NAS boxes for. Look at that iomega StorCenter PX12-400R #35876 (diskless) for $4000, more money for half as many disks, a sixteenth the memory, okay admittedly a faster CPU, but no OOB management. Geez.

 

[joeschmuck]

Pfft. Lightweights.

Ah, yes, I'm a lightweight and wish I were a little lighter but I really hope your system is paid for with corporate money because your system looks nothing like what I'd think a home system would be.

 

[mbro]

Aw you guys have more money than I do.
Decommissioned desktop from work: free
A couple of 160gb disks from the scrap pile: free
4gb of ram scavenged from some desktops: free
USB key to boot freenas off of: $7
Couple of 1TB disks found in the scrap pile (upgrade 2 of the 160gb disks to 1tb): free
Purchased a pair of 2TB disks: $220
So I'm working with 3TB of usable space for around $227 so far. My upgrade path is to replace the 1TB disks (two of them remain) with 2TB disks and resilver. That will effectively double my capacity to around 6TB for another $220 or so (depends if I can find a super stellar deal).

 

[HolyK]

Well, i build my first full-capable NAS just a month ago ( topic HERE ) for approx $1615 and i love it !

 

[jgreco]

your system looks nothing like what I'd think a home system would be.

I must have missed the "home" in your original question. I read it as "How much money have you sunk into your FreeNAS project?"

If we were to add that little qualifier in, though, what would you expect a large home system to look like?

What about an energy efficient large scale system?

One of the choices I've made that I think is more correct than the classic Norco case and random high power ATX power supply (usually around $550) is the use of a high quality chassis. Quality Supermicro drive trays and a redundant power supply.

You'll be saying "Yeahbut that's still double", which is true, but then I see people coming to the forum who are purchasing 16- and 24-drive controllers, and spending lots of money to do so. An M1015 with the 846BE26 works fine, and my way is $1275 for chassis and controller, while the Norco and a 24-port card is $1800 or something like that. Of course the clever cheapskate will opt for a Norco and three M1015's, so that's probably a win at $800, but I'm pretty happy to pay 50% more for a much better option.

And yes, it may be company money, but when you're the boss and profit/loss eats your personal income, what's the difference? For about the last year, I've been replacing gear that we designed and deployed in 2005. It's now 2013. That's seven plus years. The good or bad choices now are likely to follow us until maybe 2020. Many companies replace gear every three years. If I spend more money but get significantly better reliability and significantly more mileage, is that a bad thing?

If you look at it under that lens, suddenly the choice of a server board that supports 10GbE is not as shocking...

- - - Updated - - -

(depends if I can find a super stellar deal).

Sam's Club had Seagate Backup 3TB's (the external things with the 3TB Barracudas inside) for $115 last time I was there. Was real tempted to pick up some.

 

[joeschmuck]

I must have missed the "home" in your original question. I read it as "How much money have you sunk into your FreeNAS project?"

If we were to add that little qualifier in, though, what would you expect a large home system to look like?

Nope, no qualifier, it's fair game to everyone. I'm just jealous that I don't have your funding.

 

[cyberjock]

Seems like a lot until you look at what vendors are selling NAS boxes for. Look at that iomega StorCenter PX12-400R #35876 (diskless) for $4000, more money for half as many disks, a sixteenth the memory, okay admittedly a faster CPU, but no OOB management. Geez.

And this is where FreeNAS, NAS4Free and other projects shine. If your company was smart about who they hired they have options that can save them significant cash, almost like getting the technician for "free" if the technician saves the company enough money.

 

[jgreco]

Nope, no qualifier, it's fair game to everyone. I'm just jealous that I don't have your funding.

Fair enough. I'm jealous that we don't have the funding of places that can go and blithely spend whomping big dollars on something like the Netgear ReadyDATA 5200 (12 drive Supermicro, Xeon 2.66GHz, 16GB RAM, 4x 1GbE, 2x 10GbE) for only $7000. You'll notice my FreeNAS project described above is approximately twice that platform for half the cost. The question becomes, what is all that extra cash buying?

 

[cyberjock]

It's buying name brand and the CEO's limo rides to and from work. :P

Sorry, but I perfer to not buy because of name branding nor pay for the CEO's limo ride. I'll pay for my own limo ride if anyone's :)

 

[jgreco]

It's buying name brand and the CEO's limo rides to and from work. :P

Sorry, but I perfer to not buy because of name branding nor pay for the CEO's limo ride. I'll pay for my own limo ride if anyone's :)

I only fly my helicopter to the corporate jet once in a while.

 

[paleoN]

CPU + Motherboard + RAM + PSU + NIC + Fans + Case + Cables

• ≈ $482

Hard Drives:

• 
  2 x Seagate ST2000DM001:
  $240
• 3 x Seagate ST2000DM001:
  $210
• All Drives:
  $450

Grand Total: $932

Wouldn't it make sense to separate out the drives as they are a fixed cost either way?