Recommend a Pre-Built Workstation

[tjs4ever]

Greetings,

I am looking to replace my old, slow NAS (currently 2 - DNS-323 and 1 external USB drive shared via my Asus router) with a single centralized unit to hold all of my data plus something to stream my media throughout my house. I am using a little over 6TB of my (combined) ~11TB of network storage. I will have a max of 4 simultaneous users.

I have read the recommended hardware section, I know I want a Xeon machine with ECC RAM, I would like 6 SATA ports (I could live with 4) that will accommodate larger than 2TB disks, and hopefully end up with one large RAID-5/RAIDZ or RAID-6/RAIDZ2 array with 4, 5, or 6 3+TB drives. I understand if I go ZFS I should aim for 16GB (or more) of RAM. I will keep my other devices as backup, so UFS is an option. Now, to my question:

Older workstations can be had inexpensively online. Is there an Optiplex (or HP/Lenovo) equivalent with ~6SATA ports, Intel Xeon, 8+GB ECC, supports GPT disks that someone can recommend prebuilt? I see users here running Optiplex 755/745 but they are disk limited for my purposes. I can also get used supermicro or other retired servers on fleabay that come with tonnes (32GB+) of ECC RAM, dual quad xeon, but are typically loud and rackmount, and are limited to 2TB disks. I prefer my machine to be quiet and in a full/mid tower form factor.

I am not afraid of a DIY approach (I work in IT) so I will consider any hardware suggestions, but am strongly leaning toward something prebuilt, as myself and colleagues can often buy retired machines reasonably.

I also have my former gaming machine that is sitting here doing very little, specs are as follows:

Core2Quad Q9550 (currently at 3.4Ghz), MSI Neo3-FR P45 motherboard, 6GB DDR2 @960mhz 5-5-5-12. Of course it will never support ECC RAM, and I will need an add-on card as motherboard is 2TB limited. Will it have enough horsepower to RAID-6 or RAIDZ2 ~16TB?

I don't want to break the bank, my budget is ~$500 CAD/USD not including drives of course. Any insights would be appreciated.

-T.J.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I can't really recommend any workstations, but you could think about gutting the gaming pc and replacing the motherboard, cpu and memory. A nice budget system that is fully supported could be:

SuperMicro X10 motherboard (take your pick)
Intel G2020 Cpu (as long as you don't transcode this is a good cpu)
16 GB of ECC Ram

Then you have 6 sata ports for a nice raidz2. I personally went with 6 3TB WD Reds in Raidz2.

 

[tio]

An old XW8600 should be fine for this or thereabouts.

However you can easily get away with a new small server like a N54L or N40L to do the job, this can support 16GB of ECC ram and the rebates from HP usually make these boxes very cheap.

CPU's are overrated for FreeNas unless you're doing heavy compression or dedup, i have the equivalent of a T7200 in my N54L and it barely scrapes the sides scrubbing, or any general stuff i do. I easily get 1Gb speed over CIFS as well.

The N54L supports 4TB disks and would do well as a quiet and low power server. If yorue after rack mount, then avoid things like 1U as they need much faster fans to push the air through, they start to quienten down around 3U as 120mm fans can be used to generate the airflow.

 

[Kingedgar]

Any Dell Workstation T7400 or newer. I am running a Dell T7400 for my FreeNAS server right now. It has 2 intel xeon E5405 cpu's, 8gig of FBDIMM ECC ram (planning on upgrading to 32gb soon), and 6 sata ports. This box has served me well for 5+ years. I started off with just plain FreeBSD and then went to FreeNAS as soon as the 9.x branch came out. I am loving the setup right now and planning on upgrading ram and hdd's within the month.