Is my choice of hardware correct?

[Riv Bal]

Hello,

I am new here and have been on the look out for a solution of large centralized space for my new home. I am fairly good with computers and Windows, have dealt with Linux and have installed and maintained a few PHP CMS websites.

At my home there are 4 users of hard drive space at all times and currently I am running a PC/media center/gaming machine in my room with a Xbox 360 remote to play the games. Nothing too flashy but runs all the games decently and never thought of upgrading it more. It has total 80+160+1000 GB space and a little headroom left in all of them. Also I get a few guest users who which to copy files from me or give me files. The other people in the house use android devices for watching small media files and they use commercial cloud services.

There is another PC running in the house with a 2TB drive and is intended as a media center and gaming machine with a Xbox 360 controller as well.

I have components from my old PC setup still kept in box with me, from the days of DDR2. I intend to use this setup as my FreeNAS box in the coming months. I will be purchasing a new system to be my media center and gaming device, and will keep my current setup to run as a proper PC in my room.

The setup I wish to use as the FreeNAS box is configured as such:
Pentium D 945
4 GB DDR2
Gigabyte 945-GZM micro-ATX

OR my current setup
Q6600
8 GB DDR3
ASRock micro-ATX (forgot the model number)

This and a planned 8TB of hard drives with future expansion options. There are 4 SATA 3GB/s ports on the first motherboard. Both motherboards have the same socket, LGA775. I have never experienced or learned about Raid setup, the aim of this mini project is to have a lot of space for media files, personal files, and any other junk which is downloaded by the users at home or transferred by or to guests.

Now I looked at the commercial Seagate, WD, and several options, they all cost money, I am going for the lowest possible cost involved in this and thought this would be feasible and my own for the geek in me.

This device would be downloading torrents, media streaming (to at least 3 big TVs), and our cloud storage for the mobile devices (I want to remove all our personal files, pictures, and videos from commercial services like Dropbox). It will be kept in my "sanctuary" room away from wife and kids and properly ventilated. This will be connected to a 60 mbps up and down internet connection which has been introduced only last month in my country.

So I hope I explained what I intend to do with this. Is my choice of hardware suitable for what I have in mind?

 

[cyberjock]

No.. neither is adequate. If you read through just the hardware requirements in the manual and my noobie presentation(which shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes tops) you'd be able to answer your questions for yourself.

So you've just shown that you posted before you did 30 minutes of responsible research on your own. Just a hint.. you can expect to get flamed to high heaven if you ask questions asked in the manual or stickies.... We've spent many hours providing those resources and it's a slap in the face if you ask what we've already answered.

 

[Riv Bal]

I come in peace :) flame me all you want.

So the Pentium D is supported.

I will not learn if I don't do it, even if the CPU is old and I make mistakes.

But I will get on reading for now since your signature has links I can follow. Thank you.

 

[cyberjock]

supported? Did you even look at the hardware requirements section for FreeNAS?

What part of "8GB of RAM is the minimum" and "ECC RAM is highly recommended" wasn't clear enough?

You are going to have a hell of a time on this forum... I can see it already.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I will not learn if I don't do it, even if the CPU is old and I make mistakes.

I like your attitude but please bear in mind this large, allcaps, bolded warning:

DO NOT PUT DATA YOU CARE ABOUT ON YOUR TESTING/LEARNING SERVER

Cyberjock is not being short with you for no reason; there are very real massive risks to using hardware that isn't up to far. It's been a couple weeks since I've had to tell someone "whoops, your server is toast and it took your data with it" but I do not relish doing it again. Especially in your case where you talk about moving all of your family's data onto your own server. Personally I'd suggest you still keep a copy online; if you don't trust the cloud storage providers (which I don't) then encrypt everything client-side before upload with vetted open-source crypto.

If you read nothing else, please take the time to read the newbie guide in his signature.

 

[Riv Bal]

Of course I will test it first, won't load any important data if I'm not sure of the system. All will be test data.

cyberjock, 8GB is for ZFS RAID setup as I understand (and as per the user guide, it's recommended minimum, not required minimum), so what if I do UFS on this. In all my reading (about RAID) I feel like RAID is just a bigger risk. If I am backing up my data periodically anyway, why would I need to setup RAID? So I will research on that some more. As it is now, the data is being shared everywhere from my PC with Windows network without RAID or any special setup anyway. hmmm.....

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

The only instance when your data is less safe on a RAID than on single disks is when using RAID 0, which has no redundancy. Very crudely put a RAID is JBOD with built-in backup of some sort. You either have the exact same date on more than one disk (RAID 1) or have one or multiple sets of parity Bytes spread across all your disks (RAID 5, 6, Zx) from which the data on a disk gone bad can be reconstructed for usage and be written on a new disk.

This is becoming important with the capacity of todays HDDs reaching amounts where a URE (unrecoverable read error) could be encountered at 3 times disk capacity of data read.

A RAID does not however make external backups totally unnessecary - though that is IMHO more a question of importance of data vs cost.

I'd also strongly recommend you to NOT run FreeNAS on consume grade hardware unless for a test setup used only to get the hang of it.

I did use hardware similar to what you put in your post for a full-time-use system and even though I did away with ZFS and used UFS on a single disk I got all kinds of funny stuff happening which all went away when I went the extra mile to buy server-grade hardware. (You don't need to spend 2+ grand for this. my used Supermicro machine I bought off eBay cost me about 200$).

Yes, it will install and run on your old hardware, but not as you want it, that's guaranteed

As for RAM: DO use ECC capable components, especially with ZFS. And put in enough. I have 8GB in my system with free RAM being well below 1 gig on average