BUILD New FreeNas Box, Build Check

[RagedScavenger]

Hey guys, I;m new to FreeNas and need your help, I've never used FreeNas before but I think its the perfect fit for what I want.
I've been wanting to have a place to securely store all my files, video/photo edits, and HD Homerun recordings.
I planned to backup the system every month to a couple of 1.6TB data tapes to keep my important documents secure, my dvr recording I could care less about. But, I want to carefully plan out what kind of hardware I will need.
I plan to run freenas, PLexmedia server, and HD Homerun DVR Engine (if I can), and maybe even a transcoder to minimize video file size. I will be streaming at minimum 1 or 2 video streams from plex at any one time.

I planned a used server build with supermicro parts since I know they come recommended. I will rack mount almost all my networking gear in the future, this is just the start for my home.

Case(Already bought): SuperMicro 2U Server CSE-825 Chassis - Ebay
Motherboard: Supermicro Motherboard X9SRA
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.60GHz
RAM: I have DDR3 ECC Registered RAM from an Old server I salvaged, 2GB Dimms, but I can fill every slot for a total of 16 GB's
PSU: inlcuded with chassis/ redundant 700W PSU's
HD's: WD Red's or HGST( not sure on size yet, probably going with 4TB )
UPS: I have a current one I can use, Next month I will order a CyberPOwer CP1500AVELCD or a 1u Rack mount UPS
HBA: I would like to use the intergrated sata ports for a little while for 4 drives, when I need the additional 4 drives I want to go with a IBM ServeRAID M1015 flashed to IT mode and connect all the drives to that.

This initial cost without drives will be about $550, as I had the RAM, UPS, and backup tape drive all handy.
I can upgrade to an HBA card and additional RAM in the future.

Is this sufficent to run what I want? Also, might it be overkill? Or Should I stick with a lga1155 CPU with a higher core clock for samba and stuff?

 

[nightshade00013]

The CPU in question will have no problem with Samba file transfers. It will easily fill a 1Gb/s ethernet connection and likely be able to handle 10Gb as well.

I would suggest just buying a couple sticks of ram that is known compatible. Yes you will always be able to upgrade the ram but there is no way of knowing if it will work with the configuration and to upgrade you will have to swap it out anyway. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if the ram you have on hand is a slower speed, mismatched, possibly kingston and it's not a great idea to just throw parts at something you want to be as stable as possible.

16GB is a good starting place, should run things fine.

You can always add a HBA like the M1015 later on, just remember with the backplane you are looking at you will need breakout cables to make it work. 8 SAS ports on the controller and 8 SAS ports on the backplane will allow you to use all the drives off the controller. The bad thing here is you will need at least RaidZ2 or two mirrored sets with 4TB drives. RaidZ2 will be a better option for a home user since any drive can fail and not need to worry about another drive failure during a resilver. Mirrored drives however can not have another failure on the same set. The bad thing is either way you will have half the drives used for parity. More cost now but more cost effective to get more drives right away, do an eight drive RaidZ2 with 4TB drives and have a total capacity around 24TB or do two vDev's with four drives each at 4TB and have around 16TB of space. It's penny smart now and dollar wasting later on unless you want to destroy your pool and then restore things.

As far as transcoding software you will likely have to run it under a VM or a separate client machine but with things done correctly at the start you will have less worry about space so this should be a non issue unless you have some extremely bloated video files.

No idea on the HD HomeRun there does seem to be a FreeBSD version but there is no guarantee it will work in a FreeNAS jail.

On the tape backup drive...Well someone else will need to weigh in on that but from what I have seen they all require SAS interfaces to work with anything modern and using it with FreeNAS is a great big blank space for me. Plus the drive will need to have enough capacity to deal with the size of your pool to be relevant which probably also going to include some costly tapes.