New Build - Check part choices?

[haroldj97]

I have been wanting to get a NAS for a while to store all our family photos, documents etc. in one location so they can be accessed by all our computers (4 computers that are in daily use). I also want to backup all the computers to the NAS. I didn't whether or not to build a NAS or build one but I decided to go down the build route. This is the build that I came up with (don't really have a lot of money to spend):

PCPartPicker part list: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/M2sDK8
Price breakdown by merchant: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/M2sDK8/by_merchant/

Memory: Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory (£59.54 @ Scan.co.uk)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (Purchased For £0.00)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£39.59 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asrock Q1900 Mini ITX Motherboard (£64.21)
Case: X-CASE ITX NAS (£47.99)

Total: £211.33

I would install FreeNas onto this. I currently have a Western Digital Green hard drive in my desktop which I use to backup my desktop to and I was planning to put that in the NAS to act as the backup drive for the computers and use a 1TB Western Digital Blue as the main storage which I will also backup to the Green. I know the hard drives probably aren't the best choices for NAS' but I already have one drive and don't really have too much money to spend on any more. Would this be a good enough build for FreeNas

 

[nick779]

Prepare for the "Read the FAQs" Flaming.

Theres numerous threads on recommended hardware for these servers, and the only recommendation you really adhered to was 8GB of ram, but its not ECC.

Read the sticky's in the hardware forum and reevaluate your build.

Edit: Cyberjock's post below mine has the primary Hardware Recommendation thread in his forum signature.

 

[cyberjock]

^^^ That.

Good luck.

 

[haroldj97]

Sorry. I did have a look over the sticky post on hardware posting before posting this however the parts suggested are considerably out of my budget and ecc sodium RAM seems more expensive than standard desktop DIMMs (out of my small budget) so I was wondering if the cheaper parts I had chosen would suffice for a FreeNAS build

 

[Fraoch]

Here's the lowest-cost FreeNAS server that meets the specs:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/cheapest-way-to-build-a-freenas.26903/#post-171507

You may want to look at OpenMediaVault or NAS4Free. FreeNAS uses ZFS which is enterprise-level and requires server-level components. ZFS is pretty unforgiving in this regard.

 

[nick779]

Here's the lowest-cost FreeNAS server that meets the specs:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/cheapest-way-to-build-a-freenas.26903/#post-171507

You may want to look at OpenMediaVault or NAS4Free. FreeNAS uses ZFS which is enterprise-level and requires server-level components. ZFS is pretty unforgiving in this regard.

This ^^

Ive seen plenty of people get by with a low cost system, FreeBSD based or even windows based. FreeNAS is an enterprise level OS and requires decent hardware to function the way its designed to function.

You also could do a synology DS213j and get a 3tb red for $330, then you can mirror the disks for redundancy.

 

[marbus90]

The HP Microserver Gen8 is also a low-cost system. Just add RAM, instant small FreeNAS.
I'd put the Blue aside, buy another 3 or 4TB Green and create a raidz2 on the 4 disks. There's no need to keep backup and "main" storage separate, saturating Gbe is no problem anyway.