My first FreeNAS build

[mute]

Thought I'd share the build I did a couple of months back because I've been so pleased with how it's been performing. It's nothing special and can't hold a candle to some of the crazy huge builds I see people posting but it's more than adequate for my home media serving.



Specs:

• 4 x 8GB, 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-12800 memory (Crucial)
• Fractal Mini R4
• OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W PSU
• Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
• Intel Xeon E3-1230 v2
• SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16 GB USB Flash Drive (ESXi boot drive)
• 2 x IBM ServeRaid M1015 (1 for ESXi, 1 for FreeNAS)
• 2 x WD Red WD20EFRX 2TB (Raid 1 for ESXi Datastore)
• 6 x WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB (ZFS Raid-Z2)

I'm running ESXi 5.5 on it, and using hardware passthrough to pass one of the M1015's through to a virtualized FreeNAS instance (with 16gb of ram). It's been up and running since October with no issues so far, and the performance is great (I can easily saturate a gig link copying files off a CIFS share). I've also got some other instances virtualized on the host as well for development purposes.

I'm relatively new to the FreeNAS world, and to be honest am more of a Linux guy than a FreeBSD guy, but this is hands down the nicest OSS NAS package I've had the pleasure of using. We've got 3 TrueNAS units at work now (2 HA units w/ a JBOD in our colo and a secondary unit in the office datacenter) that replicates backup data via a 1 gig MPLS link that are a pleasure to work with.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Looks great! Good stories are always nice to hear :)

 

[cyberjock]

Your hardware strangely mimics mine. Good build though. Nice picture of the interior. I saw that board and immediately thought of mine.. haha

 

[joeschmuck]

Very nice.

 

[Nindustries]

Thanks for sharing, looking good!