Gilley7997
Dabbler
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2015
- Messages
- 42
I have been roaming around the forums and reading all the stickies and a few specific posts about hardware that I was looking at. There is a lot of excellent information here for people getting started. Kudos to you all!
Let me give you a brief reason for needing to do something. We currently have 2 desktops in the house and both machines hard drives are well over 85% capacity at this point and growing rapidly with a new baby in the house. I currently have a small 2 Bay Synology 211j that we picked up many years ago that is used as a backup location and also serves small bits of media out. It has 2 x 2TB Drives in a mirror currently and has worked out thus far for what I wanted it for. The little box just doesn't have enough horse power to serve as file server to the entire house and definitely doesn't have enough horse power to be used as a Media Server.
Looking at other Retail NAS solutions they just don’t have the horsepower and for the money they are asking, I just feel that I can do better.
My goals for changing the household environment:
1.) Reading some of cyberjocks posts about data corruption, bad memory and backups has made me a little apprehensive about FreeNAS as a whole. It’s probably still less risky than storing the information on the individual desktops. Is FreeNAS stable enough to be used as the safe source for all my files?
2.) LSI Controller on motherboard. I believe I found posts from jyavenard and Sir Robin concerning the process of flashing the Onboard LSI to IT mode. There was also discussion of whether it was necessary to do on this board. I didn’t see that discussion resolved. Anyone have any input on this? If flashing is still recommended is version 16 still correct and this has to come from SuperMicro?
3.) Backups: I think the above backup plan will work for my needs. I have 2 disks of redundancy in the system itself and a single copy on the synology. I have tested the rsync functionality to the synology from another linux system and believe I have that working correctly. Is there a better way to do this? Also, when I do decide on the Offsite backup option, I am tempted to run the offsite backup from the synology itself and take the load off the FreeNAS system, but is that an acceptable way to do that, or should I always make the offsite backup from the FreeNAS system directly? What do other people use for their offsite solution?
4.) I would like the ability to if I need a little extra storage for something that isn’t part of this environment to be able to just drop a hard drive into the NAS system and create it as a separate zpool and use it. This type of usage would be for nothing permanent. I don’t see a problem with this except of course shutting the system down and running the risk of bumping cables or causing some other issue.
5.) 550W Power Supply enough for this (if I end up maxing the 14 Hard Drives) or is it to much?
6.) I don't have an immediate need so I haven't looked much into this yet but if there is something I should include in the build that is difficult to add later to be able to run Plex and or other Jail Add-ons in the future please feel free to let me know.
7.) Anything else I should be thinking about or considering? Any issues with the hardware above?
Thanks for all the information you all have provided thus far via other sections of the forums. I am looking forward to your feedback.
Let me give you a brief reason for needing to do something. We currently have 2 desktops in the house and both machines hard drives are well over 85% capacity at this point and growing rapidly with a new baby in the house. I currently have a small 2 Bay Synology 211j that we picked up many years ago that is used as a backup location and also serves small bits of media out. It has 2 x 2TB Drives in a mirror currently and has worked out thus far for what I wanted it for. The little box just doesn't have enough horse power to serve as file server to the entire house and definitely doesn't have enough horse power to be used as a Media Server.
Looking at other Retail NAS solutions they just don’t have the horsepower and for the money they are asking, I just feel that I can do better.
My goals for changing the household environment:
- Move all data off of our machines and store in a central shared location. Data includes home videos, pictures, documents, large music library, Optical Disc Images and such.
- Current data is approx 500GB with an expected 200GB of growth per year
- This data is important. (A.K.A my wife would kill me if it would disappeared)
- I would also like to store system images of the workstations on this
- Have an onsite backup of the FreeNAS box.
- Have room for expansion as at some point I want to add a virtualization environment and would like to use this system to host the storage for that, but not share the same shared file system pool.
- Either use DLNA or Plex to source the media out to the rest of the house.
- ***FUTURE*** Offsite Backup either through a service or FreeNAS solution somewhere else.
- Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F (Plan to use the Onboard LSI controller for future expansion)
- Processor: Xeon E3-1231v3
- Memory: Crucial 2x8GB DDR3-1600 Unbuffered ECC - CT2KIT102472BD160B (Seems to work with this board)
- Storage: 6 x 1TB Western Digital Reds(WD10EFRX) in a RAIDZ2
- USB: 2x16GB USB2.0 SanDisk Cruzer Fits (Mirror the boot image)
- Power Supply: Seasonic SSR-550RM 550W
- Case: Fractal Design R4 (Seems I can find a way to nicely get 12 3.5” Drives in this case if I wanted/needed too.)
- There will be a UPS involved. I have been following the posts concerning the CyberPower stale data problems so still considering what exactly to do here.
- FreeNAS system will be Central Storage for all files, and system images
- OnSite Backup solution – RSYNC to a single drive in the Synology. This backup drive will not be redundant in any way.
- No current offsite backup solution except for a USB hard drive stored off site.
1.) Reading some of cyberjocks posts about data corruption, bad memory and backups has made me a little apprehensive about FreeNAS as a whole. It’s probably still less risky than storing the information on the individual desktops. Is FreeNAS stable enough to be used as the safe source for all my files?
2.) LSI Controller on motherboard. I believe I found posts from jyavenard and Sir Robin concerning the process of flashing the Onboard LSI to IT mode. There was also discussion of whether it was necessary to do on this board. I didn’t see that discussion resolved. Anyone have any input on this? If flashing is still recommended is version 16 still correct and this has to come from SuperMicro?
3.) Backups: I think the above backup plan will work for my needs. I have 2 disks of redundancy in the system itself and a single copy on the synology. I have tested the rsync functionality to the synology from another linux system and believe I have that working correctly. Is there a better way to do this? Also, when I do decide on the Offsite backup option, I am tempted to run the offsite backup from the synology itself and take the load off the FreeNAS system, but is that an acceptable way to do that, or should I always make the offsite backup from the FreeNAS system directly? What do other people use for their offsite solution?
4.) I would like the ability to if I need a little extra storage for something that isn’t part of this environment to be able to just drop a hard drive into the NAS system and create it as a separate zpool and use it. This type of usage would be for nothing permanent. I don’t see a problem with this except of course shutting the system down and running the risk of bumping cables or causing some other issue.
5.) 550W Power Supply enough for this (if I end up maxing the 14 Hard Drives) or is it to much?
6.) I don't have an immediate need so I haven't looked much into this yet but if there is something I should include in the build that is difficult to add later to be able to run Plex and or other Jail Add-ons in the future please feel free to let me know.
7.) Anything else I should be thinking about or considering? Any issues with the hardware above?
Thanks for all the information you all have provided thus far via other sections of the forums. I am looking forward to your feedback.