Mini ITX build & a few questions

[The_Hitman]

Hello,

To start again I'm a complete noob when it comes to FreeNAS, and the only documentation I've ever read about is preparing a jail for rtorrent. Without reading about FreeNAS first :)

Let's start with the build.

Mobo: ASRock J4105-ITX with Intel J4105 CPU. (Very power efficient, but is it too new?)
Case: Chieftec Flyer Series FI-03B 250W (very cheap and PSU is Bronze certified. Can fit 2x 3.5 inch HDD's)
RAM: Crucial 8GB, DDR4, 2133MHz, CL15 SODIMM (non-ECC)
HDD: One Seagate ST4000DM004, 4 TB. (Only 5400 RPM but huge data density and huge cache, should be enough speed for me. If it proves to be reliable I'll buy another one for mirror. If it fails I'll buy a Western Digital one lol :) )
Flash Drive: SanDisk Ultra Fit v2 16GB USB 3.0 (Will boot FreeNAS off of it)

So this is a budget build, most of these components were at a discount and the price was very low (260 Euro/300 USD). Now the noob questions from me :)

- Will this even work? The platform for the J4105 is very new.
- How do I install FreeNAS to the flash drive? Just write the image file from my laptop?
- Where can I find the documentation for the backup of freenas settings (in case the HDD screws up), and setting up: a torrent server, media server, wordpress and automatic backup to an ftp (this is what I intend to do with the build).
- Is the CPU powerful enough to do this? My internet connection is gigabit, and assuming the HDD performance and overheads I expect torrent downloads and ftp up's to happen at around 90 MB/s (ish?)
- Using both RAM without ECC and a single had drive (for now). Is this a bad idea? Should I use Ubuntu instead of FreeNAS?

 

[Dice]

Hello!
Welcome to the forums.

Will this even work? The platform for the J4105 is very new.

This is a sound concern.
Run a couple of searches on the forum to look for trends in reports of either successes or problems.

How do I install FreeNAS to the flash drive?

This is covered in the manual.
hint: you do need 2 medias.

Where can I find the documentation

http://doc.freenas.org/11/freenas.html
Strategies on how to back up jails can be found in the forum. Comfort yourself with the use of our lovely search function :)

Is the CPU powerful enough to do this?

Good question.

Using both RAM without ECC and a single had drive (for now). Is this a bad idea? Should I use Ubuntu instead of FreeNAS?

This is a highly relevant question.
Judging from the setup and intended usecase, I'd estimate it would be far easier to setup on Ubuntu verse FreeNAS.
Plus, you're essentially not getting any leverage from the excelling points FreeNAS has to offer in your configuration.

 

[Chris Moore]

So this is a budget build, most of these components were at a discount and the price was very low (260 Euro/300 USD)

The time to ask your questions was before you purchased the hardware. I would never suggest going for the latest generation hardware for the very reason you bring up later in the post.

Will this even work? The platform for the J4105 is very new.

 

[The_Hitman]

Thank you, this cleared out my main issues, I scrolled a little through the main documentation. I'll end up trying it and see what happens.

Indeed I started scrolling through the forums after I placed the order, nobody confirmed so far if the platform works but I'll try. In my country the second hand PC market is crap and finding a good Mini ITX motherboard is hard, ECC memory even harder... The alternative would've been a Kaby Lake Celeron at a more expensive price than this.

I'll offer any help that I can if freenas fails to work on the pc.

An even dumber question, and I'm not sure if I can ask here: What are the alternatives to freenas if it doesn't work or proved to be more difficult? NAS4Free? Desktop Windows even, if I disable background services? Ubuntu Server, but I find that harder to set up than freenas?

The PC will arrive tomorrow, I'll post an update.

 

[The_Hitman]

Update:

The PC arrived. FreeNAS works perfectly on the J4105 !

Unfortunately however, I found the process of setting up jails too frustrating. So I installed Ubuntu Desktop and had everything set up. @Dice Indeed for my (dumb/home user) user case, Ubuntu was the right choice. Thank you everyone!! Just if everyone needs this information, the ST4000DM004 is a pretty fast drive, can download torrents at 100 megabytes per second, and it actually boots ubuntu quite quckly. Will return with some benchmarks under ubuntu, just for the sake of it.