BUILD New to FreeNas, Looking at Super Micro 5018A-MHN4 Build

[vade]

Hello

First time poster here. Forgive me If I've missed any forums best practices in this post :)

So I'm looking to build a small home office / media storage / backup system for a few Mac machines, and it was suggested that FreeNAS could solve all my needs, and indeed looks like a perfect fit.

For my build my goal is not insane performance, but relatively quiet, 1U form factor that has a good power supply and will last a long time, that I can throw into my rack with some of my video equipment and not be bothered by too much.

I need to store a ton of video and photos, project files, and centralize Time Machine backups in a single place for about 4 Macs. I plan on using either Crashplan or or Backblaze from the FreeNAS server to give me off site backups.

So I've looked at a small 4 drive build using a super micro 5018A-MHN4 chassis. From all I can tell its quite quiet considering its a server form factor (~ 27 - 33 db) and I can put 4 SATA drives in there, it has 4X Gig-E so I can directly attach my workstation to one, another to the router for internet, and 2 floating for direct Gig-E to the laptops when I need them.

During my research I saw : http://www.teckelworks.com/2014/10/building-a-freenas-server-with-a-supermicro-5018a-mhn4/ which gave me some good confidence this would be a good build.

So I'd love some feedback, I'm thinking :

5018A-MHN4 :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101872
$639.99

Either WD Red WD50EFRX 5TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236738
$199.99 ea
4x $799.96

Or WD Red WD60EFRX 6TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236737
$259.99 ea
4x $1,039.96

I'm not sure if it makes sense to get the 6TB drives, as the price difference is quite high. I was thinking of configuring with 10 to 12 TB of space.

And finally memory
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Supermicro/superserver-5018a-mhn4
$185.99 16Gb

For a simple build I don't think I am missing anything else? I have a keyboard and monitor for setup - and can pick up a simple USB drive as per recommendations to host the FreeNAS OS.

Have people in the community gone similar routes? Any surprises or things I should be aware of considering my use case? Any better options? Its been a long time since I've build a system, so any advice is awesome.

Thank you for any feedback!

 

[SweetAndLow]

I think I would go with something that had more options for drive expansion. With 4 drives you are only going to get 50% of your pool capacity to be usable. But if you have 6 drives in a raidz2 you get 66% of your pool capacity or ever 8 drives in a raidz2 you get 75% of total pool capacity. That is a nice little 1U server and would be great for a router but I don't think it would satisfy most peoples needs when it comes to a storage server, unless you truly do only need 4 disks. You should also make sure you have UPS as part of your build.

 

[vade]

Thanks - I do have a UPS / Power Conditioner already as part of my workstation setup already :)

Do you have a chassis recommendation? I really do prefer the 1U / half depth form factor since I can just pop it into my rack, but your point stands on drive efficiency - I actually didn't quite realize RaidZ2 scaled that way - thanks. Now I am reconsidering. Perhaps the node 304 is the way to go for something small and quiet.

 

[Darren Myers]

Take a look at this thread , his build looks very compact and has ample storage. Might be worth investigating

 

[vade]

Thanks, thats super interesting. Doing a little research on the Node, it loos like NewEgg has a combo for a FreeNas Build: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1744486

Seems pretty decent actually. Should I be concerned with anything in that build? Seems pretty straightforward :)

 

[marbus90]

Both systems are something which we'd recommend - altough now we'd rather recommend 2 USB sticks to utilize the mirrored boot function. :)

4x6TB in raidz2 = 10.9TiB with 10% reserved for keeping it nice and speedy would be just under 10TiB. But it is indeed a nice system - one customer bought this for a FreeNAS with 4x5TB disks and was quite happy about it.
With the Node 304 however you can use 6x3TB or 6x4TB -> either same usable space compared to the 1U solution or ~13TiB nice and speedy.

As for the network config, I'd rather plug everything directly into a Gbe capable switch or router.