NAS Kicker

[OneRingRuler]

Is there anything upon which I can improve? Never built a NAS before, so is the memory overkill to take advantage of more resource hungry features of FreeNAS, or should I bump up to an i5 CPU? All constructive input is appreciated!  B)

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/DyrtD3

[Stadin6]

I think you should be using a Xeon and ECC RAM. 

[manikyath]

I think you should be using a Xeon and ECC RAM. 

well, a lot of the i3 processors (included the listed one) support ecc.

 

and yes, if you're gonna do freenas, you should do ecc.

 

that said, i personally dont really think freenas is worth it...

[matjojo]

for better redundancy you might want to go for 4 drives of 3TB or so, it's the same raw storage amount but can offer better redundancy for dying drives.

 

these might be good.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd3001ffsx

[OneRingRuler]

for better redundancy you might want to go for 4 drives of 3TB or so, it's the same raw storage amount but can offer better redundancy for dying drives.

 

these might be good.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd3001ffsx

Is there much defference between the Red and the Red Pro drives? I thought that the Pro were only useful in Enterprise NAS with up to 16 drives.

[vorticalbox]

I freenas recommend 1 GB per TB of storage as a  general rule of thumb. also remeber you can not use the drive freenas is installed on as storage so you might what to boot it from a USB druve,

[OneRingRuler]

I freenas recommend 1 GB per TB of storage as a  general rule of thumb. also remeber you can not use the drive freenas is installed on as storage so you might what to boot it from a USB druve,

This is good to know, thanks. Is it preferable to use a USB 3.0 flash drive, or can I get away with one of my spare 2.0 drives?

[matjojo]

Is there much defference between the Red and the Red Pro drives? I thought that the Pro were only useful in Enterprise NAS with up to 16 Drives.

 

 

this was just a quick look for like 2 minutes. I would indeed normally not tell you/somebody to buy WD red pro drives when normal reds would do(like now.)

[matjojo]

This is good to know, thanks. Is it preferable to use a USB 3.0 flash drive, or can I get away with one of my spare 2.0 drives?

 

 

2.0 is already way fast enough for the boot freenas bootdrive

[Godlygamer23]

As of right now, my FreeNAS server does not use ECC RAM and it's running just fine for almost 3 months straight. I would advise you to perform ZFS Scrub on the drives at least once a month or preferably once a week.

[Mikensan]

If you're not going to run jails / virtual machines / plex, you could actually get a G1610 or whatever is newer and still get ECC support. The only thing about ECC memory is corrupted data, not stability. So you may never know you have an issue until you try to open a file - and nobody is opening terabytes of data everyday to check the integrity. If you want the technical reason, there are a lot of articles about it if you search. i have no need for encryption or running plex on the NAS, so my G1610 can handle ~100mbps on a Raidz1 of 5 drives via CIFS.

 

I would agree with matjojo - 4 drives vs 3, so you can run it in raidz2 / raid 6. I just had a drive fail on me and terrified of another drive dying right now while waiting on the RMA.

 

Red Pros I think have a faster RPM and longer life cycle iirc.

 

I do not think the H97 chipset supports ECC. There are supermicro motherboards that do, and I personally enjoy IPMI, being able to power on/off, view console etc... from a little java applet is a god send. Made flashing my LSI card to IT mode easier - guide up on one screen, console on the other.

 

Otherwise I like seasonic, the i3 is a little powerhouse, and the node 304 is a popular case. The reds shouldn't get too hot inside of there.