Media Server Build

[Meekolai]

Hi all newcomer to FreeNAS and the forums,

I have been planning on building a media server to store my DVD and Blu-ray rips for a while now. I was undecided between UnRaid and Freenas, and have chosen to go with Freenas as the community and development seems much better [not to mention the cost ;)].

Potential Specs (as of writing this post):

CASE: SUPERMICRO CSE-822T-400LPB Black 2U Rackmount Server Case 400W Power Supply w/ PFC 1 External 5.25" Drive Bays
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152109

MOTHERBOARD: GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-USB3 AM3+ AMD 760G HDMI USB 3.0 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128565

PROCESSOR: AMD Athlon II X2 270 Regor 3.4GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor ADX270OCGMBOX
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103953

I plan on a ZRaid1 with 6x WD 2TB Reds with 16GB of ECC ram (The reason I went AMD instead of Intel)

The linked motherboard supports 6 on board SATA ports which covers my ZRaid but leaves no room for the possibility of adding more drives later (eg Transmission data drive).
I was thinking about getting a HBA along the lines of a IBM M1015 or an LSI 9211-8i and using it in the PCIe 16x slot (barring compatibility).

Depending on the Realtek LAN chip used on this motherboard I may pick up an Intel PCIe 1x Ethernet card.

As I am new to FreeNAS 8, I am looking for any input with my plans so far. The role of this box is to store video files ranging from 50MB to 20GB (mostly MKV). I may decide to run the transmission daemon (possible 7th HDD) but other than that I don't plan to run many other services (DLNA will be done on another more powerful server)

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Transmission Data drive? What's wrong with using datasets ontop of your zpool?

A zpool is made of 1 or more vdevs (like your raidz). And datasets are like partitions ontop of the zpool that can expand and shrink based on usage.

 

[Meekolai]

My plan was to just recycle an old hard drive if at a later date I wanted to add the transmission plugin as I would rather dedicate the zraid for just media storage.
Doing some more research I do not think I will be adding transmission to my Freenas box; rather create a VM for it and keep the whole server just for media.

Are the benefits of using an add in HBA worth the extra cost and possible compatibility issues (PCIe compatibility/etc)? I'm looking mainly at the IBM M1015 and the LSI 9211-8i which seem to be almost the same card.

This server will be running 24/7 with a UPS. Is ECC ram mission critical here? I prefer budget ECC over desktop ram in any 24/7 operation but it really limits motherboard choices.

 

[Milhouse]

It might be even easier to add a Raspberry Pi for Transmission.

I'm using a 512MB headless Pi with 32GB SD card and Raspbian OS, powered by a USB port on my network router (alternatively I could use a USB port from the FreeNAS box) and it's running Transmission, Sickbeard, Logitech Media Server and dnsmasq without a problem. Additional network services will be a lot easier to add to the Pi than messing around with FreeBSD plugins. The only plugin I run on the FreeNAS box is MySQL for XBMC metadata (Pis make great XBMC players too - OpenELEC my preferred distribution) though even MySQL could be run on the Pi.

Another advantage of using a Pi in place of a plugin jail is that the disks on your FreeNAS can spin down, as by default they'll be kept active by most plugins (writing to /var/log or /var/tmp, not to mention the default plugin cron jobs). To be honest I'd only recommend plugin jails as a last resort, or for a very limited set of requirements (ie. plugins processing large quantities of disk-based data, or that will benefit from the increased CPU performance of the NAS).

 

[Meekolai]

I had forgotten about the Ras Pi!

That's a great idea! ++ Milhouse

Also - Anyone have experiences good/bad with Western Digital's newer NAS Red line of hard drives? From what I understand they are Green drives with a more customizable firmware (TLER/etc)

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

What's wrong with the transmission plugin? It runs in a jail (FreeBSD virtual machine with almost zero overhead) so it can't mess with your base OS.

 

[Meekolai]

There isn't anything wrong - I see it as an excuse to play with a Pi.

I want to keep the zRaid dedicated to my media storage and unless I get a HBA add in card I will not have enough sata ports.
When I get a HBA card at a later date I may look into using the transmission plugin.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

There isn't anything wrong - I see it as an excuse to play with a Pi.

I want to keep the zRaid dedicated to my media storage and unless I get a HBA add in card I will not have enough sata ports.
When I get a HBA card at a later date I may look into using the transmission plugin.

do you know what datasets are? and what the freenas plugin jail is?

 

[Meekolai]

I apologize for my ignorance on this matter - but I do not.

I did some reading on the wiki. Datasets look like a type of virtual partition. Is this right? My main concern is just lots of useless reads/writes from transmission as none of the things I download are important - I feel better about putting the extra reads/writes on a HDD I don't care about.

I wasn't surprised about plugins being virtualized, that seems like good practice in case of a plugin crash.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I apologize for my ignorance on this matter - but I do not.

I did some reading on the wiki. Datasets look like a type of virtual partition. Is this right? My main concern is just lots of useless reads/writes from transmission as none of the things I download are important - I feel better about putting the extra reads/writes on a HDD I don't care about.

I wasn't surprised about plugins being virtualized, that seems like good practice in case of a plugin crash.

No worries, well at least you know now and can decide what works best for your situation. yeah datasets could separate transmission's activity from parts of your storage on a software level but doesn't isolate it on a hardware level.