BUILD Please help me get an appropriate CPU/mobo

[Danny TW]

I've read through the hardware recommendations in this forum and in the FreeNAS docs, but I would still like a little guidance from the experts before I purchase my motherboard and CPU, and possibly for the case also.

TLDR; I want a unicorn proc/mobo that uses 0.001w at idle (do they make CPUs yet that generate power at idle?) and has more computing power than NASA.

A brief overview of me: I've done hundreds of desktop PC builds (pretty even mix of high-end gaming machines, mid-range home PCs, office workstations, etc) professionally, so I'm ok with putting stuff together and researching whether it should work together. I've never built a server.

What I have already:

• 2 SanDisk USB drives for mirrored boot.
• 2 x 3TB WD Red (mirrored). Planning to either buy two more drives to set up in another mirror, or buy another drive and add it as a third mirror

What I need advice on:

• MotherBoard (IPMI, reliable/powerful chipset,)
• CPU (I was trying to compare i3 vs Xeon vs Atom, but I can't figure out if current Atom cpu/board is reliable/powerful enough in FreeNAS yet to even be in the running.)
• Maybe case (will start out with 2 HDDs. Might get up to a total of 4 or 5. Will prob end up getting one of the fractal designs cases recommended in the recommendations sticky post)

Once I have a motherboard and CPU, I can find compatible (ECC) RAM for it. I'll start with a single 16GB stick and pick up another one if I feel I need more. What I'm looking for is some guidance on my use case for FreeNAS.

What I want in a FreeNAS system:

• This will be used primarily as a file server (photos and home videos), and to serve media. I need some redundancy for convenience, but am backing up offsite
• Low electricity usage. This machine will be running 24/7/365, but realistically, will probably be used less than 2 hours per day, so I want something that won't draw a lot of power when it's not in use.
• Powerful enough to run a MAX of 2 video streams Plex/Emby/Netflix?/something, only one of which might need to be transcoded, but usually only one stream at a time. HD, not 4k.
• Knowing how I like to mess around with things, I will probably install a ton of Jails to play around with and end up using very few of them. This is not a priority.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Editing my RAM preference

 

[pirateghost]

General rule of thumb is that you can never have too much RAM

 

[Stux]

For six drives and mini itx, probably the best case is the node 304.

Alternative is an ATX or mATX board, I'd recommend a skylake X11-SSM-F. Use a 16GB Dimm, and you can add up to 4 of them for 64GB. I like the E3-1230v5 CPU. High clocks, 8 threads.

Or get a smaller CPU. Such as the i3. You can then upgrade later.

SSM supports 64GB, 8 Sata drives and 4 PCI slots so you can expand to 10gbe, SAS and dual NVMe SSDs

Fractal Define R5 is a popular case.

 

[nojohnny101]

i have the fractal node 804 and like it. it is running an ASRock c226m-ws. I have it running an intel G3258 and it handles my plex needs just fine (i stream [always 1080p] at any given time to 1-2 people locally, mostly direct plays and 1-2 people remotely transcoding).

My backup freenas box runs an ASRock c2550d4i and that was my primary before it became my backup. It could handle the same workload as the c226m-ws as far as plex was concerned although i chose the above board as my primary because the g3258 has a higher clock speed and benefitted the single thread CIFS shares I run.

So for your use case, I would say an intel avoton would be just fine. iXsystems puts the ASRock c2750 in their mini xl they sell.

If you are going to run a lot of jails, you want a lot of ram as @pirateghost said.

Be careful when planning your storage needs staring out. It seems like you have done some reading which hopefully included @cyberjock PP presentation for noobs starting out. In it he references how once vdevs are added to a pool, they can not be changed. if your storage needs increase, you can either replace all drives in said vdev with bigger ones which will expand storage (but not until you replace all drives in the vdev) or you would have to destroy the vdev and create another with greater number of disks or you can stripe another vdev to your pool. basically what i'm trying to say is try and buy as many disks (within reason) as you can afford starting out, especially if you want redundancy then you will probably want to go with radiz2 (good choice because good balance between performance and redundancy). if you setup a radiz2 vdev with only 4 disks in it, you are losing 50% of your capacity to redundancy. if you can have 6 disks when you initially create your vdev, you will only lose 33% of your raw capacity to redundancy.

lots to think about with storage configurations. lots of factors to consider as well.