Upgrading NAS - Need Second Opinion

[GigabitXe]

I am currently in the process of planning an upgrade for my NAS. I use my NAS for Plex media storage, as well as overflow storage from my PC, and backups of some non-critical data. I am currently using around 500GB of storage, but that will likely increase soon as I being to import more media.  

 

Right now, I am running a setup that is quite honestly, not very good. I have Ubuntu installed on a FX-6300 system with 5GB of mismatched RAM and a salvaged 2.5in HDD for the boot drive. The network shared storage is made up of some combination of four hard drives (two of which I know are 1TB) put together in a striped logical volume (totaling just under 2TB usable space). On top of this, I have the system running a Plex server with all the media stored on the aforementioned logical volume. As far as I am concerned this is a disaster waiting to happen as there is no redundancy and the drives I am using are old Seagate models of unknown age that were pulled from leftover systems, and are not NAS rated or anything like that (as a disclaimer, this was built when I was experimenting with hardware and was not planned as a long term solution.)

 

That being said, I am planning to upgrade my NAS. The complete part list is here. Anything marked as purchased is something that I already own from previous builds. The plan is to run FreeNAS off a flash drive and put the two 4TB WD Red drives in a mirror. I would then run Plex as a plugin and I might even add ownCloud at some point. As far as I can tell this will be a far better solution to what I currently have and would also allow for more flexibility.

 

Here are a couple questions:

1.      Are there any changes or upgrades that you would make to this build?

2.      What should I do with the old drives (the ones currently in my NAS) after I build a new system?

 

[Turretgaming]

get a cheap i3 4130 or better (something with 2 core and hypertheading and runs at 3ghz or more for the core clock and count) then get a cheap ass board. you dont need a gpu either so as long as it has enough sata 3 ports or u use pcie to sata 3 cards which are like 20$ on amazon and then get 8 gigs of ddr3 ram minimum as i am recommending FreeNAS as you can set up pools for different users and run plex all in plus place and did i mention FreeNAS is free. And i think the 2 4tb drive should have the count upped to 4 at least and if that cost is too much then get 4 2tb and run either (just make sure there is 4) in raidz2 for 4tb of total data available and 2 drives can fail and the raid will keep working (4 2tb set up. with the 4 4tb set up you will have a lot of data with same fail over) or use raidz1 and have 6tb with one drive fail over (2tb 4 drives if you go 4 4tb you will have a butt ton of space) and make sure you have 8 gig of ram minimum and every tb over 8 add 1 gig of ram per tb so 4 4tb would need 16gigs of ram no matter the raid. and lastly Freenas loves intel cpus over amd for some reason so go intel for stability.

[GigabitXe]

Thanks for the response. However, the cost that comes having 4 drives is too much for me at this point. Unless I can get 4 2TB WD Blue instead of WD Red. Also, I have done some research and found that most people running FreeNAS on FX series processors have no trouble, so I can't justify buying a new CPU and motherboard just because it might be better. To that note, I do have some old Core 2 Duo chips w/ boards and a Pentium chip with a board (I have no idea which models). Should I use one of those instead of the FX-6300?

11 minutes ago, Turretgaming said:

i am recommending FreeNAS as you can set up pools for different users and run plex all in plus place and did i mention FreeNAS is free.

I already stated pretty clearly in my original post that I would be using FreeNAS. 

[Firewrath9]

get ironwolfs, are they are cheaper, and just as good.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/6MX2FT/seagate-ironwolf-4tb-35-5900rpm-internal-hard-drive-st4000vn008

or, if you are really cheap, regular 4TB barracudas are 90$

get this unmarked ram

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/CnW9TW/patriot-memory-psd38g16002,

and I'd get a display output gpu, 

https://www.google.com/search?q=evga+b-stock&oq=evga+b-stock&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j0l4.3155j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

get at the very least, a GT 730 (there is a better GDDR5 version), recc 1030, or go on ebay for like a GTX 750,or 660.

[GigabitXe]

3 hours ago, Firewrath9 said:

get ironwolfs, are they are cheaper, and just as good.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/6MX2FT/seagate-ironwolf-4tb-35-5900rpm-internal-hard-drive-st4000vn008

or, if you are really cheap, regular 4TB barracudas are 90$

get this unmarked ram

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/CnW9TW/patriot-memory-psd38g16002,

and I'd get a display output gpu, 

https://www.google.com/search?q=evga+b-stock&oq=evga+b-stock&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j0l4.3155j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

get at the very least, a GT 730 (there is a better GDDR5 version), recc 1030, or go on ebay for like a GTX 750,or 660.

Thanks for the input. I will look into the ironwolf drives and the suggested ram. I have several old GPUs laying around (including a Quadro 410) so that is not an issue.