This is my story about why I use FreeNAS and the hardware it is running on
My final build excluding drives http://pcpartpicker.com/list/VwkYgL
Background
I have two Mediasonic four bay non RAID enclosures, one USB 2.0 and one USB 30 and to be honest they serve files just fine, a little slow but once my media was on them it was great and the drives worked just like any other internal drive.
You know how I said the enclosures work just fine, well they do, until they don't. You can't perform SMART tests on drives in them, this means you have no warning of eminent drive failure.
February this year I noticed that one of my drives had just disappeared, sadly the data was not backed up and it was lost. I decided that I was foolish, and my house needed some sort of centralized redundant storage to serve 4 peoples devices TVs, phones, tablets, and computers (My house is wired with CAT6 to every room)
60 Days of research
I guess RAID5 or even better RAID6 was the way to go. On the surface traditional RAID sounds great, but after looking into it, I could not use it. Without a BBU on the controller the write hole problem risk was to great, bit-rot was also a concern, lastly the array is often locked too a controller or motherboard and can't be moved
Maybe a QNAP, DROBO, SYNOLOGY store brought NAS was the best idea? Nope mostly they are over priced, under powered computers with limited drive bays, more importantly I heard to many stories mentioning data loss or corruption.
Interestingly the SYNOLOGY OS is based on open source software and a PC version of it exists, Xpenology supports as many drives as you want and looks good but lacked support, I looked into unRAID and it just looked like it was going to be hard to setup and one mistake results in data loss, don't virtualize unless you are a professional.
All I want is redundant, expandable storage, how is this so hard to find? I found out about ZFS and it ticked all the boxes. Having only used Windows computers for the last 25 years I needed a GUI that supported ZFS, two contenders remained NAS4free and FreeNAS.
NAS4free was the interface I liked the most, it even had drive temperatures showing in the GUI, but it looked like it had only a few people developing it, and if I needed help in the future it may not be available.
FreeNAS was now my only choice, and was going to be my operating system of choice. At this point I had a huge choice to make, re-purpose older hardware and be done, or buy ECC supported hardware. Everyone seemed to say "If you use ZFS, you must use ECC RAM, or the world will end" or "who cares about ECC RAM, you don't need it" however most agreed that having ECC RAM was better than not having it, so I decided to buy ECC supported hardware.
When I do buy computer equipment I tend to buy stuff that will usable for a long time, I only retired my Q6600 last year after 8 years of service, and it still worked great, hopefully I can do this again.
Hardware Choices
I brought my budget case in March and purchased the rest of the hardware needed in May, after weeks of reading about what was needed and or recommended. I wanted a case that could support many drives, but it had to be normal upright case that didn't look out of place in my home, no rack mountable cases were considered. Because of price I settled on a Zalman MS800 case as it has 10 5.25" bays, by adding 3 cheap 3x5.25" to 5x3.5" drive cages with cooling and one hot-swap bay to it, it supports 16 drives.
Because my case could support 16 drives, I needed a motherboard and HBA that could support them, Everyone keep saying buy a Supermicro motherboard, If you need more drive ports get a M1015 HBA
I went for the older X10SL7-F, It has proven reliability running FreeNAS, and flash the SAS controller to IT mode P20. The native 14 SATA ports on the motherboard could not support 16 drives my case could, I needed 2 more ports, due to it compatibility and price I went with the PCIe 4 port SATA IO Crest 88SE9215 (It works), I now had 2 free SATA ports and could also support a SSD 2 way mirror, Velcro will have to secure the SSDs in the case.
32GB of ECC RAM (The whole point of the build) had to be purchased and the crucial CT2KIT102472BD160B kits worked with the X10SL7-F motherboard. I maxed the motherboard out and got two, in future ECC DDR3 UDIMMs may get harder to find.
The cheapest CPU I could buy was the G3258 it maxes out my gigabit ethernet, If I chose to use PLEX and if it can't trans-code fast enough I can always upgrade to a Xeon
Testing and Build
Remember my old Q6600, this became my test machine, setting up Email alerts, forcing them to be sent, what happens if you pull the FreeNAS boot media? (your pools stays online), how many pool drives can I unplug and still be served data? How fast is RAIDz2, RAIDz3? What happens if I build a pool with a damaged drive? How wide can I span a vdev and rebuild it in a timely manner? Does unplugging the server from the wall while running kill FreeNAS? Setup data sets, automatic scrubs, short and long SMART tests, also setup auto-snapshots and do a rollback even recover a previous version of a file so you know how, you get the idea. (The full screen red warnings are great)
When the parts arrived in late May, the hardware build went smooth, except for flashing the SAS controller to IT mode P20, but in the end I managed to do it
I am glad I did all the experimentation, I have had two drives fail, one just stopped working, I got the Email and replaced it, the second was throwing errors, and after a week it to died, got the Email and it was replaced they both had 40000+ hours on them, My oldest 2TB drive has over 50000+ hours on it and is still going strong. My NAS use case is mainly file sharing, with a little PLEX, as long as my pools can saturate a gigabit ethernet I'm happy.
I am currently running 3 pools:
My main pool is 8x2TB RAIDz2, my SSD mirrored pool, and lastly a temporary a 3x4TB RAIDz1 pool
Short term my aim is to buy more 5x4TB drives, destroy the temporary 3x4TB RAIDz1 pool, then add a second 8x4TB vdev to my main pool.
I'm not going to lie, I have an offline, offsite backup of my critical photos, files, and documents, but have NO BACKUP AT ALL FOR ANY MEDIA, and if I was guessing 99.999% of home users don't, I get that RAID is not a backup, however this is way, way better than not having any redundancy at all.
Conclusions
So that is my FreeNAS story, maybe the only thing I would consider doing differently is getting the X11SSL-CF motherboard with a G4400 CPU, it can support 64GB of DDR4 RAM and it supports the same number of drives with less cable clutter
Is is worth building a ECC supported system to run FreeNAS? I say yes.
Living in an island paradise is great, until you need something special, If by some miracle it is stocked locally, you pay a premium. Otherwise you have to try import it, overpaying for currency conversions, shipping, and taxes.
One last thing for the Windows FreeNAS users, don't transfer folders or files to it starting with a period, they are magically hidden.
Have Fun
My final build excluding drives http://pcpartpicker.com/list/VwkYgL
Background
I have two Mediasonic four bay non RAID enclosures, one USB 2.0 and one USB 30 and to be honest they serve files just fine, a little slow but once my media was on them it was great and the drives worked just like any other internal drive.
You know how I said the enclosures work just fine, well they do, until they don't. You can't perform SMART tests on drives in them, this means you have no warning of eminent drive failure.
February this year I noticed that one of my drives had just disappeared, sadly the data was not backed up and it was lost. I decided that I was foolish, and my house needed some sort of centralized redundant storage to serve 4 peoples devices TVs, phones, tablets, and computers (My house is wired with CAT6 to every room)
60 Days of research
I guess RAID5 or even better RAID6 was the way to go. On the surface traditional RAID sounds great, but after looking into it, I could not use it. Without a BBU on the controller the write hole problem risk was to great, bit-rot was also a concern, lastly the array is often locked too a controller or motherboard and can't be moved
Maybe a QNAP, DROBO, SYNOLOGY store brought NAS was the best idea? Nope mostly they are over priced, under powered computers with limited drive bays, more importantly I heard to many stories mentioning data loss or corruption.
Interestingly the SYNOLOGY OS is based on open source software and a PC version of it exists, Xpenology supports as many drives as you want and looks good but lacked support, I looked into unRAID and it just looked like it was going to be hard to setup and one mistake results in data loss, don't virtualize unless you are a professional.
All I want is redundant, expandable storage, how is this so hard to find? I found out about ZFS and it ticked all the boxes. Having only used Windows computers for the last 25 years I needed a GUI that supported ZFS, two contenders remained NAS4free and FreeNAS.
NAS4free was the interface I liked the most, it even had drive temperatures showing in the GUI, but it looked like it had only a few people developing it, and if I needed help in the future it may not be available.
FreeNAS was now my only choice, and was going to be my operating system of choice. At this point I had a huge choice to make, re-purpose older hardware and be done, or buy ECC supported hardware. Everyone seemed to say "If you use ZFS, you must use ECC RAM, or the world will end" or "who cares about ECC RAM, you don't need it" however most agreed that having ECC RAM was better than not having it, so I decided to buy ECC supported hardware.
When I do buy computer equipment I tend to buy stuff that will usable for a long time, I only retired my Q6600 last year after 8 years of service, and it still worked great, hopefully I can do this again.
Hardware Choices
I brought my budget case in March and purchased the rest of the hardware needed in May, after weeks of reading about what was needed and or recommended. I wanted a case that could support many drives, but it had to be normal upright case that didn't look out of place in my home, no rack mountable cases were considered. Because of price I settled on a Zalman MS800 case as it has 10 5.25" bays, by adding 3 cheap 3x5.25" to 5x3.5" drive cages with cooling and one hot-swap bay to it, it supports 16 drives.
Because my case could support 16 drives, I needed a motherboard and HBA that could support them, Everyone keep saying buy a Supermicro motherboard, If you need more drive ports get a M1015 HBA
I went for the older X10SL7-F, It has proven reliability running FreeNAS, and flash the SAS controller to IT mode P20. The native 14 SATA ports on the motherboard could not support 16 drives my case could, I needed 2 more ports, due to it compatibility and price I went with the PCIe 4 port SATA IO Crest 88SE9215 (It works), I now had 2 free SATA ports and could also support a SSD 2 way mirror, Velcro will have to secure the SSDs in the case.
32GB of ECC RAM (The whole point of the build) had to be purchased and the crucial CT2KIT102472BD160B kits worked with the X10SL7-F motherboard. I maxed the motherboard out and got two, in future ECC DDR3 UDIMMs may get harder to find.
The cheapest CPU I could buy was the G3258 it maxes out my gigabit ethernet, If I chose to use PLEX and if it can't trans-code fast enough I can always upgrade to a Xeon
Testing and Build
Remember my old Q6600, this became my test machine, setting up Email alerts, forcing them to be sent, what happens if you pull the FreeNAS boot media? (your pools stays online), how many pool drives can I unplug and still be served data? How fast is RAIDz2, RAIDz3? What happens if I build a pool with a damaged drive? How wide can I span a vdev and rebuild it in a timely manner? Does unplugging the server from the wall while running kill FreeNAS? Setup data sets, automatic scrubs, short and long SMART tests, also setup auto-snapshots and do a rollback even recover a previous version of a file so you know how, you get the idea. (The full screen red warnings are great)
When the parts arrived in late May, the hardware build went smooth, except for flashing the SAS controller to IT mode P20, but in the end I managed to do it
I am glad I did all the experimentation, I have had two drives fail, one just stopped working, I got the Email and replaced it, the second was throwing errors, and after a week it to died, got the Email and it was replaced they both had 40000+ hours on them, My oldest 2TB drive has over 50000+ hours on it and is still going strong. My NAS use case is mainly file sharing, with a little PLEX, as long as my pools can saturate a gigabit ethernet I'm happy.
I am currently running 3 pools:
My main pool is 8x2TB RAIDz2, my SSD mirrored pool, and lastly a temporary a 3x4TB RAIDz1 pool
Short term my aim is to buy more 5x4TB drives, destroy the temporary 3x4TB RAIDz1 pool, then add a second 8x4TB vdev to my main pool.
I'm not going to lie, I have an offline, offsite backup of my critical photos, files, and documents, but have NO BACKUP AT ALL FOR ANY MEDIA, and if I was guessing 99.999% of home users don't, I get that RAID is not a backup, however this is way, way better than not having any redundancy at all.
Conclusions
So that is my FreeNAS story, maybe the only thing I would consider doing differently is getting the X11SSL-CF motherboard with a G4400 CPU, it can support 64GB of DDR4 RAM and it supports the same number of drives with less cable clutter
Is is worth building a ECC supported system to run FreeNAS? I say yes.
Living in an island paradise is great, until you need something special, If by some miracle it is stocked locally, you pay a premium. Otherwise you have to try import it, overpaying for currency conversions, shipping, and taxes.
One last thing for the Windows FreeNAS users, don't transfer folders or files to it starting with a period, they are magically hidden.
Have Fun
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