Hello everyone -
All the parts that I've ordered have arrived, save for the Node 304 case that I'll have to purchase personally, since it costs a bomb to ship it to where I live, on Amazon. A quick run through of my parts list again:
Meanwhile, I have some questions about how I ought to format my drives. Since I only have two of them, I have only two options: either a) 2 vdevs of one drive each, giving me 6 TB useable or b) one vdev, both drives mirrored.
I'll probably go with b) because everyone says a) is a terrible option, but I have one question. Say I want to expand my storage with more drives in the future. How would I go about planning the new drives in vdevs (given that my case will have space for up to six drives total)?
Next, I understand that the single vdev will contribute to the storage pool. Have you got any suggestions as to how I ought to create my datasets for the use cases mentioned below? I believe that datasets are treated like discrete file systems, where the storage pool-dataset pair is analogous to the traditional disk drive-partition pair.
I plan to use this machine for three use-cases: backups (of the various computers at home, as well as documents and files), family photo and video storage, and finally film and music storage, where I might possibly use Transmission and Plex for the latter.
Next, is there any way to make Windows System Restore, Shadow Copies and File History work natively with the ZFS snapshots feature? All the PCs at home run at least Windows 8.1. We have no Macs around.
Is there any way to secure the shared datasets against a virus attack? For example, some very modern ransomware viruses even attack network-shared folders on Windows. Is there a tried-and-true way to prevent this?
Last few questions: I only have one Ethernet port on my wall where the system will be placed. Does the Intel LAN chipset support IPMI as well? How do I even configure the system with IPMI? I noticed there's a serial COM port on my motherboard - do I want anything to do with this, or leave it well alone?
Besides these, have you guys got any other tips, to be followed while building, installing, setting up? Cable management ideas? Should I bother with FreeNAS 10, which looks wonderful?
Thanks in advance.
All the parts that I've ordered have arrived, save for the Node 304 case that I'll have to purchase personally, since it costs a bomb to ship it to where I live, on Amazon. A quick run through of my parts list again:
- Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C236D2I (hopefully this Skylake board doesn't suffer the same BMC write issues as the Avoton ones, it's two years newer)
- CPU: Intel Pentium G4500
- RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 16 GB DDR4 2133 MHz ECC UDIMM
- OS drive: SanDisk Ultra Fit 16 GB USB 3.0 drive
- Storage: 2x WD Red 3 TB drives
- PSU: Corsair SF 450 SFX 80+ Gold fully-modular PSU
- Case: Fractal Design Node 304
Meanwhile, I have some questions about how I ought to format my drives. Since I only have two of them, I have only two options: either a) 2 vdevs of one drive each, giving me 6 TB useable or b) one vdev, both drives mirrored.
I'll probably go with b) because everyone says a) is a terrible option, but I have one question. Say I want to expand my storage with more drives in the future. How would I go about planning the new drives in vdevs (given that my case will have space for up to six drives total)?
Next, I understand that the single vdev will contribute to the storage pool. Have you got any suggestions as to how I ought to create my datasets for the use cases mentioned below? I believe that datasets are treated like discrete file systems, where the storage pool-dataset pair is analogous to the traditional disk drive-partition pair.
I plan to use this machine for three use-cases: backups (of the various computers at home, as well as documents and files), family photo and video storage, and finally film and music storage, where I might possibly use Transmission and Plex for the latter.
Next, is there any way to make Windows System Restore, Shadow Copies and File History work natively with the ZFS snapshots feature? All the PCs at home run at least Windows 8.1. We have no Macs around.
Is there any way to secure the shared datasets against a virus attack? For example, some very modern ransomware viruses even attack network-shared folders on Windows. Is there a tried-and-true way to prevent this?
Last few questions: I only have one Ethernet port on my wall where the system will be placed. Does the Intel LAN chipset support IPMI as well? How do I even configure the system with IPMI? I noticed there's a serial COM port on my motherboard - do I want anything to do with this, or leave it well alone?
Besides these, have you guys got any other tips, to be followed while building, installing, setting up? Cable management ideas? Should I bother with FreeNAS 10, which looks wonderful?
Thanks in advance.
Last edited: