Retired gaming rig will it FreeNAS?

[j0achim]

Hi,

Quite recently I bought a Asustor after having ran my own various linux home servers (as NAS and web-server) for the better part of a decade, I was hoping I was going to get a simple, reliable and cheap NAS where I could just setup a few services such as web-server, database, Plex, SABNzbd etc, which it did well untill it died :( :( Im not going to go into details as this is not the place to comment on their service or product, but let me put it simple I was not impressed with what I have got so far when I got in trouble.


So I still have a ton of equipment laying around, such as 3X sata/sas ICY BOX backplane (5x 3.5" in only 3 slots on front of case) and a case that has room from top to bottom 9 slots. PSU Corsair AX760, and a few goodies from my old gaming rig Mobo Asus P9X79, Memory 32gb dd3 Corsair Vengeance (none-ECC!!!) quad channel 1600mhz (effectively 3200mhz), CPU Intel I7 4820K (Water Cooled), GFX some fanless graphics card for the comfort of no extra fan noise (don't remember right now which, its some old Radeon card i pulled from an old HTPC), and a stack of 20 to 30 sata harddrives from 500gb to 3tb each.

I have two PCI-E to SATA (x4 slot) controllers, what brand I don't recall off the bat, they were around 60-75$ a piece when I bought them, they both have been great to me for the past 5-6 years I have had them. I am aware that the SATA controllers are not exactly top of the line and will probably not yield top notch performance.

Now I do not store anything particularly important on the NAS (I do but its stored on PC, NAS and Cloud) mainly media *cough* SABNzbd *cough*

A lot of the drives are cheap drives and of brands that I am not so found of, so I want to avoid raiding these drives, however I would like to pool the drives.

I was thinking of running two 3tb drives in Raid 1 (priority files), remaining drives in a single pool, except 1 drive which will solely be a temp/cache drive for SABNzbd it eats drives for breakfast.


Will it FreeNAS?

 

[Stux]

The 3x 5in3 work well for making a 15 bay system.

Sata controllers not so much, perhaps they'll work. If they cause problems you should replace with an HBA from the hardware guide.

No ECC is unfortunate but not the end of the world. The i7 wouldn't support it anyway.

You don't mention what size PSU you have.

And you should probably list the 15 largest HDs you have. Or just them all. At least how many of which size.

 

[j0achim]

PSU is a Corsair AX760 platinum certified (check it out here)

As for the drives, 6 are 3tb, 5 are 2tb, 6 or 7 are 1tb and various drives in the range 500gb to 1tb. ( a lot of Seagate unfortunately :/ )

I have 14 sata ports available, idea is as follows.

• 1x For system (SSD)
• 2x For raid 1 (Priority files)
• 10x ZFS, what type RAIDZ level I am not sure of yet.
• 1x For temp/cache, just some trash that is about to die, as this drive will get a ton of beating.

 

[j0achim]

Oh the 10x drives can just as well just be a spanned volume, does ZFS support a spanned volume where drives can be of different size and last but not least if a drive dies still access to remaining data in the pool? 1-3 tb I am not worried too much about but if 15-20tb suddenly disappear thats a different story.

 

[Ericloewe]

Oh the 10x drives can just as well just be a spanned volume, does ZFS support a spanned volume where drives can be of different size and last but not least if a drive dies still access to remaining data in the pool?

No. It's the kind of scenario that ZFS was not designed to handle because it makes very little sense. Data is either important enough to keep safe or irrelevant enough to throw away.

 

[pirateghost]

Oh the 10x drives can just as well just be a spanned volume, does ZFS support a spanned volume where drives can be of different size and last but not least if a drive dies still access to remaining data in the pool? 1-3 tb I am not worried too much about but if 15-20tb suddenly disappear thats a different story.

Sounds like you need to read up on zfs.

;)

 

[brando56894]

Sounds like you need to read up on zfs.

;)

Agreed. ZFS isn't something you just jump into, and if you do, expect to recreate your pool at least twice haha I thought it wasn't going to be much different than Linux Software RAID, I was wrong haha. I spent the next month or so reading everything I could about it. I think the OP may be better off with something like unRAID.

 

[j0achim]

Thanks for awesome help guys and pointing me in the right direction! I will take you up on the tip brando56894

Right now with the current hardware I have I see why ZFS is not the right fit (ECC, different size drives, sata controller), considering the prize per gb is so small in comparison I feel that replacing a handful of 2 and 1tb drives for 3tb just for ZFS would be a waste of potential, maybe price will be coming down again on drives similar to what we saw a few years back before all the trouble with the floods in Thailand. And I could then build a proper setup :)