Best Choice for a home server

[Psyonus]

Hey guys,

 

So I want to build a server at a reasonable cost.

Was thinking of getting some well priced xeons from ebay and a board.

I currently use an i7 3770 with 16gb ram blah blah blah

I have 6 drives: 4x WD Red 5tb

                          1x WD Red 6tb

                          1x WD 500gb black used for temp stuff kinda unnecessary now.

 

I run a plex server and transcode for multiple devices in the home. Often 2-3 streams of plex going at once.

 

I have a cupboard now that can be somewhat dedicated to a server it has ventilation and all that good business.....

 

What should I be looking for (quiet and above all RELIABLE)

I have used some raids before (yes yes with proper raid cards!!) but never trust it....

Can someone who is less noob than me fire some ideas my way?

 

 

Cheers dudes!

[cykablyat]

Unless you're looking to replace the 3770 because you need it for something else I think that it should be more than sufficient to handle the tasks mentioned, but building a big ass server from "real" Xeons is great fun too and will allow you to use ECC RAM when you get serious. 

As for raid cards "To hardware raid or to software raid" I'd choose a software solution, however, that's a personal preference. 

 

If I were in your shoes I'd keep your current hardware and use FreeNAS

[Arvi89]

I have been using FreeNas for 18 months now, it's pretty awesome, really fast (the network is always the limit), but you need to be careful

First I built without ECC-RAM, no I kind of regret it (bad RAM is not that common, and few people actually reported losing all of their data because of bad RAM, but the risk is not null). I also made a raidz1 (raid 5) with 3 desktop HDD (seagate) of 3 TB, now I realize that was a bad idea. raid 5 is dangerous with big drive, you should use at least 2 parity drives today (so at least raodz2/raid 6), so at least 4 drives, but this is for any NAS you will build (not only FreeNas). Also I should have bought WD red HDD instead of cheap desktop HDD.

 

FreeNas is great but you can't increase the size of your raid. If you have like my a raid 5 with 3 HDD, the only solution is to move the data somewhere else and build a raid 6 (or I could build another raid 5 and have both of them together, but that would not solve the security issue, it would only be bigger).

 

Now, my NAS is 55% full, still working very well, but I will update it because I don't want to lose my data

 

I simplified a lot, you can read much more on their website if you are interested!

[Andster29]

Get a used Dell 2900 for like $200 or so. I use one for a plex server and able to run a couple extra VM's at the same time. If you really want to use FreeNas, then the dell is actually a bad choice. I recommend ESXI with the 2900. 

[Nikolithebear]

As @Andster29 said, premade dell servers are great for home and the office.  I'm currently running an r710 as a plex, NAS, Download, and for offsite coding.  I purchased it for only 130 bucks and its a dream (16 thread's 24gb ECC Memory).

[bandon]

Like @Andster29 and @Nikolithebear said getting a premade server is probably the easiest choice. You can get a used server like the HP ProLiant DL380 G5 or Dell Poweredge R710 for pretty low prices.

[Andster29]

6 hours ago, Nikolithebear said:

As @Andster29 said, premade dell servers are great for home and the office.  I'm currently running an r710 as a plex, NAS, Download, and for offsite coding.  I purchased it for only 130 bucks and its a dream (16 thread's 24gb ECC Memory).

That is actually a pretty good system. Just be warned that most systems do not come with drives. There are also a number of people that try to see you one that is cheap that has no ram or only one cpu. I would try and get something that has at least 8 cores total and 16gb of ram. I have a Dell 2900 that only had 4 cores, that one has been turned into a boat anchor. 

 

Side note: If you want to use FreeNas, find a system that has many sata ports and has the ability to add normal sata connectors. Both my 2900's use a sas backplane that has no way of changing the power choices. 

[Psyonus]

Hey fellas,

 

Thanks heaps for your suggestions. The overwhelming advice here is to use freenas. I have experimented with unraid and it was fairly easy to get things going but I have some reservations.

I like that you can just keep adding drives and so long as the parity drive is the largest or equal to then ur safe from a single failure.

The sad news is that many of my digital photos from the last 15 years have become corrupted and I am drawn to the zfs as this scrub function is able to stop that from happening.

 

I have new gear 2x l5630 cpu and a decent MB with loads of sata ports. I have a 24gb ECC ram and now 30tb of storage space.

One major thing I don't like is the image system that keeps deleted or modified files for weeks taking up valuable space as my data is often stagnant and I only add media not remove it.

Can freenas in any way simply using zfs with the scrubing function to keep data safe from corruption allow me to just add drives to increase my capacity on a given volume without the need to move existing data?

 

wow that was long winded..... I think I got my questions out....

[samiscool51]

any old computer with 4-cores and 4BG RAM will do the job

you realy don't need server hardware, old computer systems do it well and consume MUCH less power and probely can get the same or more preforance out of a server

 

at my work we sue this config for the mail server

(pricing in U.S)

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/GcYt7h

the system has been in use for about 2-3 years (i think, i have a bad memory, maybe i need that 8GB stick of memory)

and in that time it has not failed once!

not joking, in fact one time the office got broken into and the server room was unlocked, forently they didn't take anything, but the mail server was soaked with water, luckily the morning before i tuned it off because i was going to take it home and do some matince on it but i forgot and left it there, anyways left it to dry for 2 days and turned it on, it worked! and is still working sending a email to my boss about spongebob (i do that to annoy him )

[Psyonus]

Thanks for the suggestion there, I am at a point now that I can't make a decision on.

I have a huge number of family pics from all my travels and people I met around the world and it seems that zfs is the only system that can assure me that in a few years time when I go to look at them they won't all be corrupted....

I love the storage simplicity of unRAID and the ability to simply add drives! is there a solution that has the same storage options as unRaid but also has zfs???

 

 

Hope you guys can understand what I am going on about

 

 

[Jarsky]

19 hours ago, Psyonus said:

Can freenas in any way simply using zfs with the scrubing function to keep data safe from corruption allow me to just add drives to increase my capacity on a given volume without the need to move existing data?

 

ZFS isn't expandable with extra drives like LSI RAID's and BTRFS can.

ZFS can be expanded in size by upgrading your drives to higher capacity drives. One all drives are replaced, then you can expand the volume.

ZFS you would have to create a seperate vdev to your existing one. You can add them to the same zpool, but they will be a seperate volume and not provide you any extra reliability - and you will have to have seperate parity drives in that vdev. Also adding additional vdev's to a zpool, increases the risk of the entire pool going down. 

 

With ZFS you want to build the array with the number of disks you want total, from the beginning.

Essentially if you cant afford a whole lot of high capacity disks, you generally buy a whole bunch of smaller cheap disks e.g 8x2TB, then build a new zpool. You then transfer your data onto the new pool, wipe your existing high capacity disks and replace some of the cheap drives with them. You then continue replacing the rest of the cheap drives until all disks are your 5/6TB disks. Once they're all replaced, only then can you expand the pool across the entire volume of disks. If you're doing this, you most definately want to use raidz-2 for 2 disk parity. Infact, I strongly advise against using 1 disk parity arrays in any home user case.