Newbie's first FreeNAS question

[dynaguy]

Hello, everyone, I am new here and I am excited want to try my first FreeNAS.

I need to build a File Server (Samba) for our office of 20 users. After some research I decided to try FreeNAS. Now I have some basic ideas and would like to ask here for advises.

Here is my shopping list:
- Motherboard: ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO ($130)
- CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 960 Quad Core Processor AM3 3.0GHZ 8MB ($150)
- RAM: 4x4GB DDR ECC ($200)
- Network card: 2x Intel Gigabyte ($70)
- Hard drive: 4x 2TB SATA 7200RPM 6Gbs
- Case & Power Supply:
- USB Drive for FreeNAS: 4GB
- A network switch which support LACP. (HP ProCurve 1810-24G Switch (J9450A), about $300)

Some questions I have:
1. Any suggestion for the above configuration?
2. I am going to use ZFS. How is the performances compare to hardware RAID5?
3. I am also going to use Link Aggregation. How many NIC do I need? The more the better?

Thanks for help in advance.

 

[janisi]

According, when you decide, what would be preferred file system for the box, add more RAM :D

 

[dynaguy]

Asus says the MOBO suooprt "4 x DIMM, Max. 16GB, DDR3 2000(O.C.)/1333/1066 Hz ECC, Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory
Dual Channel Memory Architecture"

So 16GB is the limit. Am I right?

Bye the way, is it must be the ECC memory?

 

[louisk]

ZFS is capable of flooding my 1G network at the house (800MB+/s). I would expect that would be sufficient for 20 users.

If you use LAGG, make sure your switch supports it, and that you configure it. Otherwise it won't matter how many NICs you have, you won't see any performance differences. Also, read up on how LAGG works and make sure you understand it.