NAS Build Help Needed!!!

[Pern-Frog]

Alright so its cold outside and I got the crazy itch to rip my 300 + DVD and 90+ Blu-Ray collection to a NAS. So my intent is to go the used eBay route and try to build this as close to 280 / 300 (not including drives) as possible. My research has driven me this route as the proprietary hardware used by stand alone NAS units such a Synology make me concerned for expansion and maintenance down the road.  Noise will be of concern so old server components will not be ideal and the smaller the form factor the better. Nothing that will be stored on this NAS will be super important to the point I would mind running RAID 0. My end plan is to run FreeNAS and use PLEX to interface with all my media. I thank everyone in advance for any input you can shoot my way.

 

UPDATE: I picked up a Asrock H370m-Mini-ITX for $50...only issue is that I need to run a 1151 CPU for it...anyone have any thoughts on if I need an I3 or if i can use a Celeron G3900 / 3920 and be OK?

[DOM2000js]

Try to find a cheap hba and use something like glusterfs, you only have to find a case to store all these drives 

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 1/10/2019 at 7:51 PM, Pern-Frog said:

UPDATE: I picked up a Asrock H370m-Mini-ITX for $50...only issue is that I need to run a 1151 CPU for it...anyone have any thoughts on if I need an I3 or if i can use a Celeron G3900 / 3920 and be OK?

Celeron would work fine here, you really don't need much cpu power here.

 

 Id look at btrfs on linux as it lets you mix drive size and easily add and remove drives, unlike freeNAS.

 

On 1/10/2019 at 9:21 PM, DOM2000js said:

Try to find a cheap hba and use something like glusterfs, you only have to find a case to store all these drives 

How would glusterfs help here, you need multiple systems for it.

[Pern-Frog]

On 1/12/2019 at 11:53 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Celeron would work fine here, you really don't need much cpu power here.

 

 Id look at btrfs on linux as it lets you mix drive size and easily add and remove drives, unlike freeNAS.

 

How would glusterfs help here, you need multiple systems for it.

Thanks for the recommendation....any thoughts on what linux would would work well and do you know if Plex has any issues reading from a btrfs drive? I know they have pretty good support for FreeNAS. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 hours ago, Pern-Frog said:

Thanks for the recommendation....any thoughts on what linux would would work well and do you know if Plex has any issues reading from a btrfs drive? I know they have pretty good support for FreeNAS. 

plex works fine on btrfs

 

Any distro will work fine, if you want simple look at ubuntu server.

[Pern-Frog]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

plex works fine on btrfs

 

Any distro will work fine, if you want simple look at ubuntu server.

Thanks, is there a specific need to use ECC Ram when going with ubuntu server and btrfs? I have been reading a lot of things about FreeNAS really liking ECC which drives the build price up.

[Electronics Wizardy]

34 minutes ago, Pern-Frog said:

Thanks, is there a specific need to use ECC Ram when going with ubuntu server and btrfs? I have been reading a lot of things about FreeNAS really liking ECC which drives the build price up.

ECC is always nice to have to keep data correct, but there is nothing about btrfs or ZFS that needs ecc more than another filesystem. For a home server ECC probably isn't worth it, esp as you have parts already that don't support ecc.