Mini ITX - Headless Home NAS - with FreeNAS, iTunes, Plex

[raj47i]

Hey all,

 

I am planning to build an always on Home NAS with the following, and I would appreciate your comments to help me chose the right spec.

1. FreeNAS(Debian is the only other thought I had) - I am thinking FreeNAS is there any reason why I should not?
2. Mini ITX Motherboard - Yet to be decided
3. RAM - Yet to be decided, Should it be ECC for FreeNAS ?
4. Processor - Low Power, Cost Effective & Powerful enough for FeeBSD & Plex, etc. - Yet to be decided.
    
5. 6 x 3.5" 3TB WD Red Hard Drive ( already have 4 in my Hackintosh/Gaming Build )
6. 1 x 30 GB SSD - For OS Installation
    
7. Case: Fractal Design Node 304 -- Can anyone suggest any other similar case which can support 6 + 1 Hard disks
8. 140mm AIO CPU Liquid Cooler - If it helps to have lower power consumption / life for the CPU?
   I have 2 spare Noctua NF-F12 PWM Fans that can go into this build
    
9. PSU - Modular/Semi modular to avoid cable cluttering. Need to calculate and decide based on the spec.

 

What I want from this?

• Reliable & Fast (As fast as possible) File Storage I am thinking RAID 6
• Should last long
• LAN Plex media server with FreeNAS plugins
• iTunes Library with FreeNAS plugins
• Always On - So need lasting Hardware
• Silent - As silent as possible
• Power Savings - This is always on and electricity is costly.
• Budget - Reasonably flexible.

I will not be using this for Gaming or Work because, I have a Massive CosmosII-4770K-Sabertooth-32GB-RAID0x4SSD-780TiSuperclocked-ish Hackintosh/PC and a Macbook for that.

 

I will update the config I select here, based on my progress, so its useful for anyone else too.

And if I missed to mention anything here, please let me know.

 

 

EDIT:

After my research and the feedback I got from @Rheinwasser, @yippy3000, @madcow I am changing my original plans to go with FreeNAS and ZFS.

So I will be create a RAID-5 or 6 with mdadm @ Debian

• Raid 5(or 6) of 6 WD Red 3TB with Debian 7.x (no GNOME or KDE, only shell / webmin access)
• 1x Fractal Design Node 304 Black
• 6x Western Digital 3TB
• 1x USB Drive or M.2 SSD for OS Drive
• 1x PSU - 450/500W -- Need to decide between Corsair CS450/RM450 or CoolerMaster Equivalent
• 1x Motherboard from Asus / AsRock / Gigabyte - 6 SATA 3 ports / LAN & price would be the deciding factor
• 1x (or 2 to go 16 in dual channel) Standard 8GB RAM from Corsair / Kingston / Transcend / ADATA
• 1x Processor - Pentium / i3 -- will decide based on the price and performance requirement for madam & Plex media server
• 1x CPU Cooler -- Stock cooler for now (I have one unused intel cooler from 4770K)

 

thanks & cheers

Raj

[Rheinwasser]

1. FreeNAS is power-hungry and you have to know how to use it, it can be quite complicated.

2. Depends on your budget.

3. Yes, ECC is prefered. You can get that stuff quite cheap used. You want to get 8GB or more depending on your usecase.

4. Depends on your budget.

5. & 6. Disks are fine.

7. There are definitely other options for a nas, but I feel the Node 304 is the best for up to six drives + its very small.

8. Just get a decent, small air cooler. An AiO won't improve performance by a lot and will take up a lot of space, is loud and expensive.

9. Any 430/500 Watt PSU will be fine, it depends on what efficiency you want and what your budget is.

 

@raj47i

[yippy3000]

2) This is probably a good board for you as it has 6 SATA ports http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-h87iplus

3) ECC is good but that might require a Xeon and more expensive motherboard, not sure if it is worth it.

4) The i3/i5 -****T series are super low power and probably enough to run what you need.  You get better bang for your buck though if you get an S or regular instead.

6) The node 304 and all mini-ITX boards only support 6 drives.  There is no room/port for your SSD unless you get a PCI-Express SSD.

[raj47i]

@Rheinwasser, @yippy3000 - thank you for the input.

 

+ I can handle FreeNAS.

+ Budget is flexible, though I don't want it to be reasonable.

 

+ I was thinking Pentium / Celeron processors will be enough; Preferred intel over AMD thinking it would be more power efficient.

   Would I need i3 ?

 

- Xeon is not an option - too expensive for the use case.

- I guess SSD is probably not needed, Probably I could use a USB Flash Drive as the OS disk.

- I didn't find much alternatives to Node304 -- considering my requirement of 6 HDDs and smaller size

 

[madcow]

ECC is recommended for ZFS. There are i3 CPUs that support ECC. I don't know exact models.

[yippy3000]

It depends what you are going to be doing with Plex.  If you use the mobile phone streaming, that is a real time encoding that it does so you will want the extra power of an i3

 

As for the Node304, I have one for my Windows Home Server/Plex box and love it. Having worked with it, you really can't get anything smaller that will fix 6 drives without going to a Flex ATX PSU instead of a normal one.  The Flex PSUs are never modular or as high of quality.

 

As for the SSD.  I highly recommend still pursuing this.  Even if not for the performance, simply having the OS on a dedicated drive makes future upgrades much easier.  Trust me, having it separate when it comes time to upgrade the data disks having the OS and some of the data on the same drive is a huge pain, especially if there is any kind of RAID involved.  You could get an adapter like this http://www.addonics.com/products/adm2px4.php and then use any standard M.2 SSD in it as an option.  Here is a pretty cheap one that would likely be fine for your needs http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820510043

 

The biggest issue with using a PCIe SSD is it means you will have to rely on software or motherboard RAID instead of hardware.  Given that I think FreeNAS has a built in psudo RAID that lets you have redundant data with different sized disks, I would probably opt for that over a hardware RAID anyway.

[raj47i]

thank you very much guys.

 

@madcow yes I want to use ZFS.

 

@yippy3000, I would be streaming plex to: Macbook Pro / Mackintosh / Fire TV & Fire TV Stick & iPhones (> 6) and I was hoping that I won't need and i3 for that. Can you tell me were I can find more about this? Also, I sure would be using a separate OS drive, but I was considering a USB Flash drive to start with and if its slower, would consider SSDs.

[raj47i]

Hm.. So I spend some time researching about ZFS, FreeNAS, XFS, BRFS, EXT4 today. And it seems like a Debian based NAS with SoftRaid6 will be much more cost efficient and reliable for me than a FreeNAS one. I also couldn't think of any reasons why I need ZFS, as I am mostly interested in the increased reliability of Raid 6.

And debian's software Raid system seems to be much improved in the last 2 years. So, I am currently thinking about switching to the Debian route.