Homeserver brainstorming, any flaws in my logic?

[Brammm]

Hi all

 

Old situation (pre-moving to new house): FreeNAS box in a Fractal Node 304 with an Asrock c2750d4i, 16Gb non-ecc RAM (I know I know!), 4*4TB drives. 

 

Now that we have moved into our new home, I'm redoing the setup. Here are some thoughts I'm having:

1. I now have a proper rack so I'm looking to transplant the thing into an actual server case. I bought a Logic Case 43400-8HS for this.
2. I had multiple plugins running in FreeNAS but really didn't like this setup (clunky to upgrade, my unfamiliarity with FreeBSD...). I would also like a Debian-flavored box at home. So I'm thinking of splitting the thing up and putting in a second server for compute tasks and keeping FreeNAS just for "dumb" storage.
3. My asrock board actually died last week after a little over 2 years of running fine. Luckily, I'm getting it RMA'd. I would use the replacement for the new compute server as I assume it's more than powerful enough for some Plex streaming (and associated media aggregation) and keep the non-ecc RAM for this, as it's now less important.
4. For FreeNAS, I'm thinking a xeon e3-1220v5 with a supermicro x11ssh-f. I like the idea of having 8 SATA3 ports to max out my server case hot swap bays and using the m.2 to install the freenas system on. Also a perfect opportunity to get some ECC ram for FreeNAS. But it's a pricey mobo though, are there cheaper options I might be missing?
5. FreeNAS is currently installed on an SSD. Can I move that whole install to that m.2 somehow so I don't lose any data? 

Any thoughts? Feel free to brainstorm with me  Keep in mind that I'm in Belgium and to be able to write things off, I need invoices, so eBay or craigslist things are sort of out of the order. I prefer buying new anyway.

[Oshino Shinobu]

One thing I would say is to not bother putting FreeNAS on an M.2 drive, it's a complete waste. FreeNAS works fine off a USB drive as once it's loaded into RAM the boot drive isn't really used. 

[Brammm]

42 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

One thing I would say is to not bother putting FreeNAS on an M.2 drive, it's a complete waste. FreeNAS works fine off a USB drive as once it's loaded into RAM the boot drive isn't really used. 

I didn't do that in the past because I didn't like the idea of having a USB sticking out the back of the case. I've read one too many stories of people accidentally damaging them and destroying their system. But the board I chose has a USB on the board, so the stick would be safe inside... Guess I could do that too. 

[newgeneral10]

20 minutes ago, Brammm said:

I didn't do that in the past because I didn't like the idea of having a USB sticking out the back of the case. I've read one too many stories of people accidentally damaging them and destroying their system. But the board I chose has a USB on the board, so the stick would be safe inside... Guess I could do that too. 

I'm planning a FreeNas build and I was planning on using one of these instead of having the usb sticking out the back.  This attaches to a USB header on the Mobo.

 

https://www.amazon.com/2-Port-USB-3-0-Female-Adapter/dp/B005AJX9MW

[Gwersebe]

I wouldn't use an m.2 as the boot drive you could have an internal usb drive to run the os and if you want you could have the m.2 as a cache for the array. 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Brammm said:

I didn't do that in the past because I didn't like the idea of having a USB sticking out the back of the case. I've read one too many stories of people accidentally damaging them and destroying their system. But the board I chose has a USB on the board, so the stick would be safe inside... Guess I could do that too. 

Internal USB ports is very standard now days in servers, most hypervisors are installed on to USB drives. I have seen a move to using SD cards for that now though, our HP servers have dual SD card slots which is nice for redundancy.

 

So if you have an internal USB port I'd use that for FreeNAS.

[Brammm]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

Internal USB ports is very standard now days in servers, most hypervisors are installed on to USB drives. I have seen a move to using SD cards for that now though, our HP servers have dual SD card slots which is nice for redundancy.

 

So if you have an internal USB port I'd use that for FreeNAS.

Huh. Thanks for that. Really reassures me. 

 

Should I look for anything particular when buying a new thumb stick for this? I'm guessing I probably shouldn't buy the cheapest one? 

[Erkel]

Nice motherboard.  Also seeing the move to dual SD cards in servers, our new Dells have dual SD cards in RAID1 for the hypervisor.

Putting an OS on a USB key is a little risky, with our esxi boxes using 4GB sandisk cruzer compact USB drives, they burnt out in about 12month, so we now replace the USB drives every time we upgrade the esxi version.   The servers still ran, just complained about not being able to write to the USB drive and will not boot again if you reboot them obviously.

 

 

[Brammm]

6 hours ago, Erkel said:

Nice motherboard.  Also seeing the move to dual SD cards in servers, our new Dells have dual SD cards in RAID1 for the hypervisor.

Putting an OS on a USB key is a little risky, with our esxi boxes using 4GB sandisk cruzer compact USB drives, they burnt out in about 12month, so we now replace the USB drives every time we upgrade the esxi version.   The servers still ran, just complained about not being able to write to the USB drive and will not boot again if you reboot them obviously.

 

 

Huh, I hadn't actually considered Dell. But yeah, half the fun is in building the thing yourself. This thing is just gonna sit in my garage and serve us and some friends some media (and then do some backup, maybe some OwnCloud)... However, the whole "burning the USB stick out" concerns me a little bit...