Revamping a FreeNAS Mini from 2013

[taltman]

I've recently upgraded my personal NAS from a FreeNAS Mini bought from iX Systems in 2013, to a custom TrueNAS 1U server.

I now need to get a NAS for my business (which, for legal reasons, needs to be separate from the NAS used for personal matters), and I'm thinking of upgrading the hardware in my FreeNAS Mini rather than buying a completely new server.

Below please find the specs for the Mini. I'm looking for "low hanging fruit" hardware upgrades that will give me the most bang for my buck, rather than just gutting the box and getting a completely new CPU+motherboard combo. For example, I'm thinking memory upgrade plus getting a larger system drive (the internal USB 2.0 storage device is ridiculously small; ~3.8 GB). Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

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Intel DH77DF motherboard:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/motherboards/desktop/dh77df/dh77df_techprodspec04.pdf

Intel Core i3-2120T 2.6 GHz CPU (four threads):

Intel® Core™ i3-2120T Processor (3M Cache, 2.60 GHz) - Product Specifications | Intel

Intel® Core™ i3-2120T Processor (3M Cache, 2.60 GHz) quick reference with specifications, features, and technologies.

www.intel.com

* 4 Hot-Swap SATA drive bays, currently with 4x 1TB WD Red HDDs, 64 MB Cache 6.0 GB/s
* 8 GB memory (motherboard docs says up to 16 GB supported)
* FreeNAS version: FreeNAS-11.3-U5

 

[jgreco]

Unfortunately, this is going to be slightly hard to refurbish. In the old days, FreeNAS booted from an embedded system image, and this made it possible to use USB thumb drives with 1GB or 2GB media for boot. iXsystems designed the early Mini's with that design in mind. However, this has fallen by the wayside, and now the system uses a live filesystem on the boot device. This is usually more than a thumb drive can bear, although there are people who have done extensive research to find high endurance USB thumb drives. The usual solution is just to use a SATA SSD, but your four SATA ports are already busy handling the drives. The best boot alternative you have available, at least without burning your one PCIe slot, is to find a USB SSD -- something with a full wear-leveling controller and designed for significant use, not just low-grade flash intended for a music collection or pictures -- and use that as your boot device. You can make your own USB SSD out of a USB-to-SATA adapter and a cheap 60GB SATA SSD, or a USB-to-NVMe adapter and a cheap NVMe SSD. There are also lots of "prebuilt" options.

As you noted, you can go up to 16GB on this unit. That's probably advisable if you want to do anything beyond simple backups with it.

From a HDD perspective, if you're happy with what you've got, you're good to go. However, those drives may have a lot of hours on them, so plan for the possibility that you may encounter failures. Consider RAIDZ2 for redundancy.

The PCIe slot is "valuable" in that it could be used for a 10G networking card (see the 10 Gig Networking Primer on these forums), but there aren't a lot of other realistic options for it.

 

[taltman]

Hi jgreco,

Thanks for your thorough reply! I appreciate your help!

I happen to have an OWC Envoy with an old hard drive left over from a Macbook upgrade:

OWC Envoy USB 3.2 (5Gb/s) Bus-Powered Portable... at MacSales.com

OWCMAU3ENVOY12 (*) OWC Envoy USB 3.2 (5Gb/s) Bus-Powered Portable External Storage Enclosure for SSD from MacBook Air (2012). Reuse the SSD from your MacBook Air as a portable external drive. Plug and play, bus-powered - no AC power adapter required. *New, Open Box*

eshop.macsales.com

It has ~128 GB of storage available over USB 3.0. I imagine the device is high-quality, as otherwise it wouldn't be used as a laptop hard drive. Do you think that would do the trick?

Do you have any pro-tips for how to make sure that I select the correct kind of memory for the Mini? I've read through the motherboard manual, but I'm not sure that it specifies everything, such as what PC2 or PC3 module number us compatible.

I believe that my drives are in a "RAIDZ10" configuration, for maximum performance.

The network is 1Ge, so I think I'm good on that front. Thanks again for your time!

 

[jgreco]

that would do the trick

Probably. Can't hurt to try!

correct kind of memory

It's going to take DDR3-1333 UDIMM. This is harder because it isn'tt contemporary memory, but a little searching shows that pcpartspicker has a list of modules specifically compatible with that board:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/?compatible_with=vrkD4D