Re-using old workstation for FreeNAS, but not sure I'm clever enough

[Yorick]

Right. Why not. You won’t use those 10G links because a single vdev will give you roughly gig speed - and why not, if you have the gear and the cabling. Have fun! :)

 

[Bikerchris]

Right. Why not

Thanks again for commenting! I haven't bought anything just yet, in fact with the current situation I'll be keeping it minimal to start with, but this is my intention. As I'm digging and building the office, I thought while I'm doing it, I might as well put in decent stuff - because once it's done, I really don't want to dig it up again! Mind you, underground cables will be in conduit, so I can pull through new cables if needed.

This is a really stupid question, but if the day came that I could populate with SSD's instead of HDD's, would the 10G link be used more then?

Always have fun! :)

 

[jgreco]

The telco copper, is the lightning suppression in the house, and you're just extending this out to another building? If so, make sure it is properly protected in the other building as well.

Running ethernet copper back is not recommended.

My big question, I guess, is why do this? Put the router in the house, and just run 10G fiber to the new office, no copper at all. This takes care of grounding issues and is safer.

 

[Yorick]

Yes, SSDs would speed things up. In a vdev, assume that the speed you get is that of a single disk. A two-vdev SATA SSD pool should be able to feed a 10G link, or "just about", at 500MB/s per disk. A single-vdev NVMe pool will be able to feed a 10G link no problem, at 2500-3500MB/s per disk.

NVMe has now become cost-competitive with SATA. The main reason to stick to SATA SSDs would be that they're easier to scale out in your design. You have plenty of SATA ports but only so many PCIe slots.

While SSDs give you speed, their $/TB ratio is still way higher than spinning rust. On sale, you can get 12TB of disk for $175. Roughly the same amount buys you 1TB of SATA SSD, depending on brand and speed a bit.

So it's about use case. Backups and plex - yeah, keep that on spinning rust.

If you ever get into video editing: A smaller SSD "work" pool would be great for that, with the finished product landing on spinning rust again. Because the pool is smaller and SSDs are more resilient than HDDs, and because it'd be a work pool not a long-time storage pool, using four SSDs in a "two mirror vdevs" configuration would be a good way to approach that, with the main hard drive storage remaining raidz2.

 

[Bikerchris]

The telco copper, is the lightning suppression in the house, and you're just extending this out to another building? If so, make sure it is properly protected in the other building as well.

Running ethernet copper back is not recommended.

My big question, I guess, is why do this? Put the router in the house, and just run 10G fiber to the new office, no copper at all. This takes care of grounding issues and is safer.

Very good point, I actually watched a video the other day of a tech wizz that was 'lending' his neighbour (parents) his internet connection via an underground CAT cable. He also used their house for an off-site backup. Turned out not to be too good as a tree in between the properties was struck by lightening and grounded onto the network cable and killed a lot of attached gear.

So yes, fiber cable only it is!

The house doesn't need a landline voice phone, but in the office I do. So I figured that I would have the new connection (phone/router) in the office and when ready, terminate the house contract. Also makes it easy to claim telecomms as a business expense. I could get a phone line extension but I've had experience with those and while they are generally reliable, I'm not so sure it would extend this distance without unnecessary faff. So I figured keep the router and landline phone next to each other.

Thank you for your comment though jgreco, does that seem sensible?

 

[jgreco]

While SSDs give you speed, their $/TB ratio is still way higher than spinning rust. On sale, you can get 12TB of disk for $175. Roughly the same amount buys you 1TB of SATA SSD, depending on brand and speed a bit.

Ehh not really apples and apples unless you're comparing aggressive sale prices in both cases.

WD Easystore 12TB HDD shucked = ~$180 on sale
WD Blue SSD 2TB = ~$190 on sale

Fair enough to say SSD is still "at least" 6x the cost when looking at sweet spot pricing.

 

[Bikerchris]

@Yorick

Thank you for that Yorick, it's only hypothetical due to the cost of SSD's, but I thought may be future proof as much as I can, even though it's a term that's a little redundant.

You're quite right, I have a fair few PCIe slots but not enough to create usable storage, also they might share the SATA a bit, making it less usable (this is an uneducated guess).

I'll definitely keeping with the spinning rust for a good while yet - you'll be pleased to know I bought 6 second hand drives on ebay (£30), so I'm going to link 4 of them (sorry, not familiar with wording yet), build up a freenas and test it in a failure situation. I've not got a lot else to do right now. The machine I'm testing on only had 4GB, so I bought another 4GB (£10) so I can at least give the machine as much RAM as it can take....yes, it's old. I was hoping to get some some random data so I can load it up and find out how to do data checking / integrity. Going to have some fun reading ahead of me!

Video editing - I was hoping to do a bit, but I've been saying that for years! I guess if I ended up with a 6 x HDD's, I could use the remaining 4 SATA ports for SSD's and create another pool? 2 mirrored vdevs sounds very sensible, thank you for that mate.

 

[jgreco]

Very good point, I actually watched a video the other day of a tech wizz that was 'lending' his neighbour (parents) his internet connection via an underground CAT cable. He also used their house for an off-site backup. Turned out not to be too good as a tree in between the properties was struck by lightening and grounded onto the network cable and killed a lot of attached gear.

Vaguely overdramatic. A lightning strike at distance can still cause large ground differentials and the mayhem can be amazing. But at least I don't need to sell you on the idea.

The house doesn't need a landline voice phone, but in the office I do. So I figured that I would have the new connection (phone/router) in the office and when ready, terminate the house contract. Also makes it easy to claim telecomms as a business expense. I could get a phone line extension but I've had experience with those and while they are generally reliable, I'm not so sure it would extend this distance without unnecessary faff. So I figured keep the router and landline phone next to each other.

Consider going VoIP. I am reading "between the lines" so forgive me if I'm wrong, but what you wrote implies to me you want to buy phone service from probably the incumbent local exchange carrier who is also providing the Internet. In the old days of low speed DSL, you could sometimes get a combination where they supplied an actual true POTS line (phone copper going all the way back to the central office). These days that doesn't seem to happen, and usually the "phone" line is a jack on the DSL modem, which gives you access to an internal ATA (analog telephony adapter) which converts IP to pseudo-POTS. The downside to this is that the POTS isn't powered by the CO, so is susceptible to power outages, etc.

Now that's not a horrible technology, but the ILEC's usually seem to want $30-$50/month for it, and it is just crappy pseudo-POTS on the backend, so you don't even get a decent phone out of the deal.

You can go to someplace like VOIPO and pay $189 for two YEARS of a similar service. (Note: I am not associated with them and don't use them myself, but my folks have for many years on my recommendation).

Or you could buy yourself a cloud-hosted PBX and some nice VoIP phones. This can end up being roughly as expensive as the ILEC ATA in the long run, but gives you AWESOME features and if you buy decent phones, great phones too.

If you're a little more masochistic, and many of us running FreeNAS might qualify, you can even run your own Asterisk, buy your DID's and dialtone wholesale, run your own PBX, and have ultimate flexibility -- but I also warn it's a LOT of work to get set up. The upside is that I'm paying around $60-$70/month (total) for phones here. That includes more than two dozen incoming lines for the several businesses I run. Over the last 15 years, if I had to pay the average commercial rate of $30/line, it means I've saved well over $100K... but I *am* just a little bit crazy.

In any case, going VoIP and avoiding the inter-building copper is a good idea if you can.

 

[Redcoat]

@Bikerchris , thanks for sharing.

Having lost my house to fire that started on the ground floor (floor designations in UK lingo to match drawing), my two servers, workstation, and laptops in the first floor office to water damage, and everything in our second floor (attic) master suite to fire/smoke/water damage, just about the last place I would put my file server would be in an attic unless my "new office" were an obvious high risk location.

 

[Yorick]

@Bikerchris Yes, you could add a second ssd pool. In the interest of keeping it simple, though: It makes sense to just put an NVMe into the video editing work station for scratch space and call it a day. High-performance networked storage for scratch makes sense in an office with multiple work stations where people might work on a project together, but for hobby - why over complicate things. Oh. Because fun. That’s always a reason ;).

 

[Bikerchris]

Vaguely overdramatic. A lightning strike at distance can still cause large ground differentials and the mayhem can be amazing. But at least I don't need to sell you on the idea.

Yeah, highly unlikely, but if the safe option is cheaper, I'm all for that.

Consider going VoIP. I am reading "between the lines" so forgive me if I'm wrong, but what you wrote implies to me you want to buy phone service from probably the incumbent local exchange carrier who is also providing the Internet. In the old days of low speed DSL, you could sometimes get a combination where they supplied an actual true POTS line (phone copper going all the way back to the central office). These days that doesn't seem to happen, and usually the "phone" line is a jack on the DSL modem, which gives you access to an internal ATA (analog telephony adapter) which converts IP to pseudo-POTS. The downside to this is that the POTS isn't powered by the CO, so is susceptible to power outages, etc.

Now that's not a horrible technology, but the ILEC's usually seem to want $30-$50/month for it, and it is just crappy pseudo-POTS on the backend, so you don't even get a decent phone out of the deal.

You can go to someplace like VOIPO and pay $189 for two YEARS of a similar service. (Note: I am not associated with them and don't use them myself, but my folks have for many years on my recommendation).

Or you could buy yourself a cloud-hosted PBX and some nice VoIP phones. This can end up being roughly as expensive as the ILEC ATA in the long run, but gives you AWESOME features and if you buy decent phones, great phones too.

If you're a little more masochistic, and many of us running FreeNAS might qualify, you can even run your own Asterisk, buy your DID's and dialtone wholesale, run your own PBX, and have ultimate flexibility -- but I also warn it's a LOT of work to get set up. The upside is that I'm paying around $60-$70/month (total) for phones here. That includes more than two dozen incoming lines for the several businesses I run. Over the last 15 years, if I had to pay the average commercial rate of $30/line, it means I've saved well over $100K... but I *am* just a little bit crazy.

In any case, going VoIP and avoiding the inter-building copper is a good idea if you can.

Funnily I've had VoIP at my office for the last 12 months and the original intention was not to put the router/phone line in the office, but now I've experienced it, I don't like the cost or the strange reliability. Before this I used a conventional landline for 8+ years and never had any problems - if the broadband went down, the phone line still worked and it took a fairly severe issue for both to become a dead parrot.

So I'm going back to what I had a good experience with. I could invest an awful lot of time trialing other VoIP providers, but I've already wasted enough time and effort in that endevour. In fairness though, as it turned out I went with a terrible company, I won't even go into detail about how incompetent they were.

I really do appreciate you going into detail about the VoIP options and describing how the local exchange is set up, but for only £4 on top of my broadband cost I can get unlimited calls out. I'm a one man band, so I don't need any complex options, I've had 2 virtual lines and it's rare that I get 2 calls at the same time - for you though, it makes complete sense!

Hehe, I like your comment about FreeNAS, I think you're spot on :)

 

[Bikerchris]

@Bikerchris , thanks for sharing.

Having lost my house to fire that started on the ground floor (floor designations in UK lingo to match drawing), my two servers, workstation, and laptops in the first floor office to water damage, and everything in our second floor (attic) master suite to fire/smoke/water damage, just about the last place I would put my file server would be in an attic unless my "new office" were an obvious high risk location.

That's a good point and I'm very sorry you had to go through that. I'm limited with space unfortunately, but also didn't want to clutter up family areas on the ground floor and didn't want to create noise on the first floor (bedrooms), so it has to go in the attic. The new office has a moderate risk of flooding, I wanted to make the building higher, but then it would become and eye sore and likely not receive planning approval. The new office has gotten planning approval despite it's overbearing size.

(That's just under 16' x 23' in US lingo)

 

[Redcoat]

That's a good point and I'm very sorry you had to go through that.

Thanks for the sympathy. Your situation understood. Make sure that you can keep the server cool, too, and set it up to email you if drives get towards the toasty side.

 

[cjc1103]

I agree SSD drives would be better than USB drives for the boot zpool, however you have to have two spare SATA ports and a place to put the SSD drives in the computer. USB drives are easier, I figured it was easy to replace a failed USB drive if I needed to. I have two servers using mirrored SanDisk Cruzer 16GB flash drives, and both have had no issues for 2 years. On the other hand I have a third server using mirrored SanDisk UltraFit 3.1 32GB flash drives, and both of them failed within a year, actually within a month. They were hot to the touch when I pulled them out. This was a test server, nothing too important, it was running on the good boot drive until that failed too. I had a config backup, so replaced both USB drives, reinstalled, reloaded the config, and was back up and running. YMMV.

 

[Bikerchris]

Thanks for the sympathy. Your situation understood. Make sure that you can keep the server cool, too, and set it up to email you if drives get towards the toasty side.

You're very welcome, I wouldn't want that on my worst enemy (well, perhaps). I will definitely need to have a good think about the temps and keeping them under control, I'm intending to insulate the attic. There is an area up there I can isolate away from the usual rubbish we put up there.

 

[Bikerchris]

Thanks for commenting @cjc1103 , I've got loads of space in my tower as well as SATA ports, but your USB experience does sound appealing...other than the failures (tough luck there!). Like you say though, you had backed things up and put it on new drives, so doesn't sound like a real bother. I will be going the SSD route for reliability, but if I can stretch to mirrored I'll definitely do that. Thanks!

 

[Bikerchris]

A little update, my 6 used 300GB drives arrived today, can't believe how quick the postage was, I was expecting them in 2-3 days. I also received the extra 4GB of ram, installed and they were successfully recognised by FreeNAS.

While I was looking at it, I changed a few BIOS settings and removed the audio and GPU card. Still works well and now I don't have an excessively noisy fan to tolerate.

Anyway, hope everyone is safe and well ;)

 

[Inxsible]

if you are planning on using the same RAM and HDDs for the actual FreeNAS install -- make sure that you burn all of those in correctly to make sure nothing's wrong with them.

I always burn in any NEW or USED components that I buy

 

[Bikerchris]

if you are planning on using the same RAM and HDDs for the actual FreeNAS install -- make sure that you burn all of those in correctly to make sure nothing's wrong with them.

I always burn in any NEW or USED components that I buy

Thank you for that, I'm just working on my test build at the moment, it's a very old system but it will allow me to become familiar with FreeNAS, before I start depending on it.

I do have a lot to learn, especially with Hard drives, but my intention is to read up and bother you good folk as little as possible :)

 

[Bikerchris]

@Redcoat @cjc1103 @Inxsible @Yorick @jgreco @sretalla

Sorry to bother you all, this is more an update on my future intentions as a direct result of all of your comments and contributions. It's got me thinking over the last few weeks, so thank you very much all.

@Redcoats comment about the risk of attic storage of servers is very valid, so I'm revising my plan to include a new low power/heat/noise snapshot server and locate it in the new outbuilding.

After all of your comments and quite a bit of research, confidently switching over to FreeNAS is not something to be rushed. So my new intentions are:

1. Build a new Windows "Server" to house my current collection of active disks attached to the Xeon machine.
2. Practice FreeNAS on the Xeon machine for between 6-12 months, using the cheap HDD's I've bought for learning the system. Including a thorough test of the hardware
3. When confident, buy 4-6 new HDD's for Xeon machine and put into active use.
4. Re-use the Windows server and make into a snapshot server.
5. Have a rest.

I am a little stuck with choosing the Windows Server come FreeNAS snapshot box though, it's quite a headache and it seems I can either:

Buy a nice ECC RAM box from Dell like the one below, for around £600 inc. TAX's

Or, build one based on a Xeon E-2124 CPU and Gigabyte Intel C246M-WU4 motherboard. The latter seems to end up costing around £600 as well...making it a bit pointless, but I can't see a cheaper way to do it. I'd like to avoid buying used, or something old which may mean loud.

Anyway comments very welcome and thank you for reading this!

FYI Cost breakdown of building a machine:

CPU: E-2124 - £200
Motherboard: Gigabyte Intel C246M-WU4 - £145
RAM: 2 x Kingston Technology RAM Memory DDR4 8GB DIMM 288pin Unbuffered (KTH-PL426E/8G) - £95
PSU: Seasonic PRIME Fanless PX 450 Watt Full Modular 80+ Platinum PSU - £130
£570