Request Additional Eyes on Hardware Choices

[dvicci]

Greetings,

I'm putting together a FreeNAS box, having walked away from the idea of a off-the-shelf unit (Thecus, Synology, QNap, etc.). Can I please bother someone to give the following list a quick once-over to help make sure there aren't gotchas, or things I'm missing? I'm brand new to NAS builds (and this forum), and through lots of research here and elsewhere, have started settling on this:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250 Dual Core
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-880GMA-USB3
Drives: Seagate ST500DM002 X 6 (500GB X 6)
PSU: Corsair CMPSU-430CXV2 (430W)
RAM: Kingston HyperX Blue 4GB DDR3-1333 X 4 (16GB total)
Chassis: Fractal Design Define Mini

I chose the board b/c I already had the CPU laying around, USB3 support, and native support for 6 SATA devices. I chose the chassis for its compatibility with the board, drive capacity, relatively small footprint, fantastic cable management, and its "stylish, contemporary design". The drives and RAM strike a good balance between price, performance, and capacity. The PSU seems overkill, but I'd rather have a little too much than too little. I'm also considering the OCZ 400W StealthXStream Pro or even the 500W ModXStream due to its modular design and SLI certification (which speaks only to its stability for my purposes) - though it would be even greater overkill.

I plan on configuring the drives as 4x2 RAIDZ2 for 2TB with the 6 500GB drives, but am open to advice here (such as RAID0+1 instead). Speed is certainly important, but reliability is paramount. This server will be used for storage, streaming, as a backup destination for my desktops, laptops and FreeBSD web/dns/smtp server, and (Gods willing) a print server. It will be nearly exclusively used by myself and my wife. I know the hardware is probably overkill, but I'm planning to keep this around for a long time with the only upgrades being larger drives and FreeNAS versions in years to come.

I'll hang a 2TB USB3 external drive off of it for backups, and am looking into encrypted cloud solutions for the really important things.

If you made it through all that, then I thank you for your time. If you respond, then I thank you all the more!

--
Dave

 

[b1ghen]

I would maybe add a PCI-E Intel NIC to top it off if speed and reliability is key.

And I must ask, why 500GB drives? If you don't have them already I think they are on the small side for a new build.

 

[dvicci]

b1ghen,

Thanks for the reply. Would a separate PCI-E NIC be significantly faster/more stable than the onboard Realtek 8111E (10/100/1000)? I've never had issues with onboard NICs, and unless the benefits are worth it, would rather not add additional hardware. The less there is, the less that can go wrong, after all.

You're right, 500GB drives are on the small side. I chose them because of cost, really, and the fact that, as of now anyway, our storage needs fit well within the 2TB that would provide. I don't anticipate that changing soon, but if it does, I can get larger drives later next year when the effects of the Thailand flooding subside, and I've had a chance to save up some more cash.

--
Dave

 

[William Grzybowski]

Realtek usually sucks, specially under FreeBSD...
I would try "iperf" to isolate the network performance...