SOLVED Lenovo ThinkServer TS440 70AQ000YUX or DIY

[falshamran]

Hello everyone,

I'm confuse between
Lenovo ThinkServer TS440 70AQ000YUX


Pro:
host swap

Con:
with 8 Caddy + 4gb ram = $536.24.
RAID support max 2tb per drive
not quite


The second device
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/KmMq99

Pro:
Perf. is the same as E3

Con:
no RAID
not support ECC

which one is better for future use?

 

[marbus90]

Please use the standard font size.

No ECC means no FreeNAS. AMD is a bad choice too. Also you don't need any RAID support, ZFS is software RAID.
The TS440 may be upgradeable to 8 bays, but you'd need a controller like the IBM M1015 (flashed to P16 IT mode) to run all 8 bays.

But let's talk about your storage requirements to determine the best system for you.

 

[falshamran]

Sorry.

What I want NAS for home use I have files, movies, Pic, music, and Time machine for mac all these I would like to be on FreeNAS. In addition I would like to make remote access to FreeNAS. Most important that I don't like to be limited per size hard drive like TS 440 2TB.

I like to this machine run even in future if I would like to get more capacity.

The budget this limit no more than $500, that why I choose TS440 or AMD.

 

[gpsguy]

How much storage, ie. xx TB do you need now? How much will you need after 1 year, 3 years, 5 years?

For your use case, RAIDz2 would probably be a good choice. A sweet spot would a minimum of 6 drives.

 

[falshamran]

Well this year my plan to use 8TB either 2x4TB or 4x2TB.

after 3 years I will go will the max which is 8*6TB or more.

 

[gpsguy]

If you need 8Gb, I'd suggest buying 6 (or 8) x3TB drives and going with RAIDz2. With RAIDz2, any two drives can fail and your data will still be intact.

I'd start out with 16GB [2 sticks of 8GB] of RAM. Ensure that your motherboard/CPU will accommodate at least 32GB.

Down the road, you could replace the 3TB drives with larger ones (one by one), and after the last drive was replaced (and resilvered), your pool would automatically expand.

 

[falshamran]

Thank you very much. That help me a lot.

 

[sfcredfox]

Well this year my plan to use 8TB either 2x4TB or 4x2TB.

after 3 years I will go will the max which is 8*6TB or more.

Looks like you have this resolved, just wanted to double check that you understood adding drives. You don't just add two more drives like hardware RAID. You add them in the same manner each time, so if you created a vDEV of 6 drives, you would want to add another vDEV of 6 drives in the same parity level.

That's why guy said:

Down the road, you could replace the 3TB drives with larger ones (one by one), and after the last drive was replaced (and resilvered), your pool would automatically expand.

He meant you would replace the drives you have one at a time, not just adding more or changing the configuration of drives.

It's not that you can't but it would be a backup/restore move.

You might have already known all this, just wanted to double check so you don't get stuck down the road.

 

[falshamran]

Hello sfcredfox,

I really appreciate it.