For years I have been aware of FreeNAS and the community, but "time" and "resources"--while previously existing in solitude--have never crossed paths until now.
After reading @cyberjock's excellent hardware recommendations thread I was sold on DoingItRight(tm) and buying a Supermicro board + ECC ram. Once I got my hardware list together I started looking for a rack mount case to put it in and ran across @cyberjock's experience with the Norco RPC-4224 (hey..he's got a lot of posts!). The 80mm vs 120mm fan comparison and @jgreco's commentary on Supermicro's tray construction swayed me to say f* it and go for a proper Supermicro case.
While looking for a Supermicro case on eBay (c'mon I'm still frugal) I found a Supermicro 16 bay 3U rack mount case for $350 shipped. Surprisingly enough, however, it also had almost an entire server inside (minus HDDs and HBAs). I thought this was a damn good stroke of luck so I jumped on it, but my enthusiasm didn't really hit until it got here in the mail today. (this is my first rackmount case..so yea, excited ^_^)
Anyway, here is what I bought: 3U Supermicro 16bay Server X7DB8+ 2x Intel Quad Core L5420 16GB 836TQ-R800B (I guess these guys are relisting until all of them are sold)
This felt like a good deal to me so I just wanted to share. Also, here is the rest of what I plan for my build:
After reading @cyberjock's excellent hardware recommendations thread I was sold on DoingItRight(tm) and buying a Supermicro board + ECC ram. Once I got my hardware list together I started looking for a rack mount case to put it in and ran across @cyberjock's experience with the Norco RPC-4224 (hey..he's got a lot of posts!). The 80mm vs 120mm fan comparison and @jgreco's commentary on Supermicro's tray construction swayed me to say f* it and go for a proper Supermicro case.
While looking for a Supermicro case on eBay (c'mon I'm still frugal) I found a Supermicro 16 bay 3U rack mount case for $350 shipped. Surprisingly enough, however, it also had almost an entire server inside (minus HDDs and HBAs). I thought this was a damn good stroke of luck so I jumped on it, but my enthusiasm didn't really hit until it got here in the mail today. (this is my first rackmount case..so yea, excited ^_^)
Anyway, here is what I bought: 3U Supermicro 16bay Server X7DB8+ 2x Intel Quad Core L5420 16GB 836TQ-R800B (I guess these guys are relisting until all of them are sold)
This felt like a good deal to me so I just wanted to share. Also, here is the rest of what I plan for my build:
- 16x 3TB WD Reds (kinda hoping Amazon runs some % off promo leading up to xmas haha)
- zpool = two 8-disk RAID-Z3 vdevs (I figure that is bulletproof enough to sleep very easily at night)
- 2x M1015s (already ordered these from eBay. I read on the forums there is a problem with fakes so I ordered them 'used' and not from hong kong or the west coast)
- Rack mount UPS (haven't gotten to the details yet, figure I'll have plenty of time to research while I burn in the hard drives for a few weeks)
- Cage/rack (I wonder how much these can suppress noise, damn thing sounds like a vacuum cleaner [though I suppose it will be quieter once it actually has hard drives in it])