Lenovo Thinkstation S30 FreeNAS Box Questions

[TA305]

Hello, I've recently taken interest in putting together a FreeNAS Box for personal/home use. I've scoured Amazon and PCPartPicker piecing together a system over the past few weeks and at the end of the day, I simply don't have the money to shell out to build a FreeNAS from scratch. I considered a RAID box like a QNAP, but that just doesn't seem quite right for me. HOWEVER, I did pick up a Lenovo Thinkstation S30 about 6 months ago just for tinkering purposes thats currently collecting dust. I'm now considering using this system as my foundation to building a FreeNAS Box. Here is a link to my system's specs:

https://thinkstation-specs.com/thinkstation-s30/

From what I've read, this S30 that I have ticks off a lot of system requirements that FreeNAS as recommended for optimum performance namely 16GB of ECC RAM. My system also has an 8 core Xeon processor, although I don't the specific model handy at the time of writing this. There is tons of expansion available with this system and I believe I would need to invest in a RAID controller card for what I'm doing as well as a dual LAN card, but I'm not 100% certain on that. In a perfect world I would get 4 HDDs to start with. I'm not sure on the RAID config right yet, but I believe 5, 6, or 10 would offer a decent bit of space while also providing decent performance and good resilience should a drive fail. I'm eyeing the Toshiba X300 series drives. From what I've read they seem to be fairly reliable and competitively priced. I'm most interested in the 5TB drives, but may end up going with 4TB to save a little money.

https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Perf...e=UTF8&qid=1521163694&sr=8-3&keywords=5tb+hdd

The purpose of this system is multifaceted. I have a huge collection of DVD/Blu Ray movies I would like to make digital giving me the ability to stream them to my TV. I also have about 100gigs of audio and several gigs of pictures and documents I would like stored in a central location with some failsafe built in. I also plan on expanding this media collection down the road. There has also been some discussion on installing a home security system and storing a week or so of video at a time would be a convenience in case something were to happen and the footage would need to be reviewed.

With all of this said, I would like to ask the community for their thoughts on all of this. Am I overlooking anything that would cause this Thinkstation S30 NAS to fail? Is it obsolete hardware for my purposes? Are the Toshiba X300 drives a good fit for my system? Is further expansion down the road feasible without having to replace the PSU? Please and thank you for all of your help and suggestions in advance!

 

[nightshade00013]

First off scrap the idea's of raid 5 6 or 10.... they exist in hardware not in FreeNAS and FreeNAS does not play well with hardware raid. It's RaidZ1, RaidZ2, RaidZ3, Mirrors and Striped drives.

As far as the system working I would guess that it should be ok. It's a little newer than my system and which is a dual E5640, you are looking at an E5 1600 or E5 2600 in the system you are linking to. However that also depends on what you are going to throw at it. 16GB of ram should be the minimum if you are wanting to run Plex and some other small stuff. And as long as the video's are in a format that your devices can handle you will have no issues. Transcoding on the fly is where you have to worry about having enough horsepower to handle things and that has been discussed to death on the forums already.

With 4TB drives or larger RaidZ1 is not really recommended which means RaidZ2 so 2 drives are sacrificed in the name of redundancy I would say start with at least 6 drives if at all possible but you really need to figure out how much storage you need and how you are going to expand later on as well before you nail that all down.

As far as the drives if it's a NAS designed drive no problem. If it's something else you are the guinea pig or you can pick something that is NAS designed and has a track record being used that way.

The PSU and upgrades it depends on the PSU and the upgrades you are thinking, it's kinda like asking if the shelf full of food in the pantry is going to last but not saying how many people or for how long.

 

[TA305]

First off scrap the idea's of raid 5 6 or 10.... they exist in hardware not in FreeNAS and FreeNAS does not play well with hardware raid. It's RaidZ1, RaidZ2, RaidZ3, Mirrors and Striped drives.

As far as the system working I would guess that it should be ok. It's a little newer than my system and which is a dual E5640, you are looking at an E5 1600 or E5 2600 in the system you are linking to. However that also depends on what you are going to throw at it. 16GB of ram should be the minimum if you are wanting to run Plex and some other small stuff. And as long as the video's are in a format that your devices can handle you will have no issues. Transcoding on the fly is where you have to worry about having enough horsepower to handle things and that has been discussed to death on the forums already.

With 4TB drives or larger RaidZ1 is not really recommended which means RaidZ2 so 2 drives are sacrificed in the name of redundancy I would say start with at least 6 drives if at all possible but you really need to figure out how much storage you need and how you are going to expand later on as well before you nail that all down.

As far as the drives if it's a NAS designed drive no problem. If it's something else you are the guinea pig or you can pick something that is NAS designed and has a track record being used that way.

The PSU and upgrades it depends on the PSU and the upgrades you are thinking, it's kinda like asking if the shelf full of food in the pantry is going to last but not saying how many people or for how long.

Thank you for the quick response! Yeah, as you can tell, this is my first go around with this idea of a NAS, but I'm ready to learn. Now that you mention E5 1600, I believe (not certain tho) that its an E3 model. I can verify and repost if necessary.

As for the RAID configuration and your recommendation, I think I should probably stick to either 3TB or 4TB drives for now due to cost constraints especially considering 2 drives aren't counting towards my storage space total. As for total storage, I can't really say. This is going to be a hobby project that I hope can stand up for several years (5+) and can absorb a new movie here and there, new photos, documents, other computer backups etc etc as time goes on so space needed is up in the air. I'd rather have more than enough now so I'm not maxing out my capacity in a year.

As for my streaming idea, thats not set in stone yet, but I love the idea and convenience of a centrally located digital library. I would make sure I have my files converted so streaming isn't such a strain on the system. I'd really like to not have to buy any additional hardware outside of my controller, NIC, and drives if I can help it.

 

[nightshade00013]

I love my Plex and streaming. That is what I did previously with a windows box and DLNA till I had drives go bad. I hate having to rebuild everything so FreeNAS was a much better option, Plex just makes the pot even sweeter. Plus I can do a lot of other things with it. I enjoy it so much I have two other servers that I setup for my father and stepdaughter to use.

 

[joeinaz]

I use an S20 in my lab as a test platform and it's not a bad system. My system came with only 2 disk caddies so make sure you have a third to fill the interior bay. My system has an NVidia Quadra card, a second ethernet card, an M1015 card I use to test disks and a USB3 PCIe card. If you want to deploy the maximum storage in that system, I might suggest the following:

A "3 in 2" disk enclosure of some sort. One option is the iStarUSA BPU-230SATA-BPL. This will give you the ability to house six 3.5" disks total
In the 3.5" space in the front panel, install an enclosure that holds two 2.5" disks for SSDs Try part # BP-SATA2221B for an example.
M1015 PCIe card flashed to IT mode. Connect all your disks and build your FreeNAS system!

 

[danb35]

I believe (not certain tho) that its an E3 model.

No, that system uses Socket 2011, so it would be an E5 model of some description.

I believe I would need to invest in a RAID controller card

Most definitely not. If you need an additional disk controller (i.e., you don't have enough SATA ports on your motherboard), get a SAS HBA of the LSI/Avago/Broadcom 2008/2308/3008 family.

as well as a dual LAN card

If you think you're going to regularly saturate the existing gigabit LAN port, really the next step should be to go to 10G.