NAS build

[stevemenendez]

I am planing a NAS build, i have everything planned except for a boot drive and an operating system. I plan on using raid 1, so i believe freenas without a raid card will suffice. I also need to chose a boot drive. i would prefer m.2 so i can populate all of my sata ports with the RAID drives, but i also need to choose a capacity. I plan on using plex, so if you could suggest a size for an m.2 boot drive, i will be thankful.

 

My current design is here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tMGCWX

 

if you have any suggestions please feel free to keep me informed

[Electronics Wizardy]

For freenas, use a usb drive for boot

 

Don't use raid on the mobo, thats what freenas is for

 

Get a pentium, no reason to get a i3,

Get a chaper board, z270 own't help here

 

No use for a ssd here.

[79wjd]

If you're going with FreeNAS, then you can use an >=8gb flash drive as the boot drive. When you boot FreeNAS it loads the OS into RAM anyway, so the boot drive doesn't matter too much -- you can do a mirror'd flash drive as the boot drive if you want a bit extra redundancy. 

 

You also don't need a Z-series board. I'd look at a B250 board with 4/6 sata ports (the most you see without a big price jump) and if you need more in the future then you can just add an HBA card or even a PCIE SATA card. There's also no reason to get an i3 when the G4560 is basically just as good but for much less.

 

I would also get a single 8gb stick of RAM so you can expand more easily if you need to. You won't need the extra speed of dual channel.

[stevemenendez]

2 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

If you're going with FreeNAS, then you can use an >=8gb flash drive as the boot drive. When you boot FreeNAS it loads the OS into RAM anyway, so the boot drive doesn't matter too much -- you can do a mirror'd flash drive as the boot drive if you want a bit extra redundancy. 

 

You also don't need a Z-series board. I'd look at a B250 board with 4/6 sata ports (the most you see without a big price jump) and if you need more in the future then you can just add an HBA card or even a PCIE SATA card. There's also no reason to get an i3 when the G4560 is basically just as good but for much less.

 

I would also get a single 8gb stick of RAM so you can expand more easily if you need to. You won't need the extra speed of dual channel.

Will I need anything special to run Plex?

[Jarsky]

2 hours ago, stevemenendez said:

i would prefer m.2 so i can populate all of my sata ports with the RAID drives

Using an m.2 drive will disable one of your sata ports FYI - so no advantage as far as ports. 

 

26 minutes ago, stevemenendez said:

Will I need anything special to run Plex?

Nothing special - the i3 you've chosen is enough for a few 1080p streams or a 4K stream - ive got the same processor in my HTPC.

Just keep your Plex library cache on your SSD as well (which it will do by default) as SSD is much much better for your plex performance in this area

[stevemenendez]

7 hours ago, Jarsky said:

Nothing special - the i3 you've chosen is enough for a few 1080p streams or a 4K stream - ive got the same processor in my HTPC.

Just keep your Plex library cache on your SSD as well (which it will do by default) as SSD is much much better for your plex performance in this area

Will I need an i3 or can I use the (previously suggested) pentium g4560

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, stevemenendez said:

Will I need an i3 or can I use the (previously suggested) pentium g4560

what are you doing on plex? Are you transcoding?

 

A pentium should transcode 1 stream just fine. A i3 will be about 10-20% faster.

 

If you not transcoding you can run many streams, around 5-10 probably.