Home NAS Build

[dyermjr]

I'm looking to build a Home NAS and almost committed to a Core i3 6100 (SL).  Although, they have the Core i3 7100 (KL) for the same price.  I'm looking at putting everything in a Fractal Design R5 because of the 8 - 3.5 HDD bays.  This is me starting a new hobby BTW, first build.  Any recommendations on motherboard with 8 + sata ports?  I would like to in the end put 8 - 3T or 4T drives (4 or 5 to start) and run Freenas on the system.  I have multiple PC's so wanted to have file sharing as well as media streaming.  Thanks for all the help in advance.

[Thermosman]

The fractal design node 804 has 8 3.5 inch drive bays and is a compact case

[moltencrystal]

i can only see a few mobos that take the 7100 or the 6100 and support 8+ sata natively..... if your comfortable with it get a second hand HBA and save yourself money on the mobo as with the only ones that have the 8 plus sata are top end boards 

[Thermosman]

14 minutes ago, moltencrystal said:

i can only see a few mobos that take the 7100 or the 6100 and support 8+ sata natively..... if your comfortable with it get a second hand HBA and save yourself money on the mobo as with the only ones that have the 8 plus sata are top end boards 

Not an issue, you can get a pcie sata controller

[moltencrystal]

5 minutes ago, Thermosman said:

Not an issue, you can get a pcie sata controller

true you could , but a hba passes drives directly through to the host, for something like freenas with zfs filesystems it makes more sense, especialy "FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system and is designed to communicate directly with your disks using its own volume manager" - from the freenas blog (http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-worst-practices/)

[Thermosman]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/WksBM8 here is a nas build it may be good, I am not an expert

[dyermjr]

What made you choose that motherboard????

 

[Oxydoreduction]

16 hours ago, dyermjr said:

What made you choose that motherboard????

 

Cause it's a professionnal board, which is, for a machine that's always on, more reliable. I would have recommended one based on the same chipset too (AsRock RAck for my side).

 

22 hours ago, Thermosman said:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/WksBM8 here is a nas build it may be good, I am not an expert

Looks good to me but:

The WD Black drives are a bit overkill, I would go for Seagate Ironwolf instead.

If ECC is needed, it would be best to go for xeon E3 or Core i3 CPU, this all depends on your needs.

In short, ECC if ZERO file corruption is vital, non ECC if it doesn't matter that 1 corruption could occur at some point.

[Thermosman]

5 hours ago, Oxydoreduction said:

Cause it's a professionnal board, which is, for a machine that's always on, more reliable. I would have recommended one based on the same chipset too (AsRock RAck for my side).

 

Looks good to me but:

The WD Black drives are a bit overkill, I would go for Seagate Ironwolf instead.

If ECC is needed, it would be best to go for xeon E3 or Core i3 CPU, this all depends on your needs.

In short, ECC if ZERO file corruption is vital, non ECC if it doesn't matter that 1 corruption could occur at some point.

Lol I have no idea I picked that board because it had 8 sata ports I know nothing

[seagate_surfer]

With your use case in building a NAS in mind, regardless of brand, you're definitely going to want to stick with drives which are branded and engineered specifically for NAS. Seagate's current branding is IronWolf & IronWolf Pro.

If you'd like to check it out, here is a video explaining the importance of choosing the right drive for the right application.

Good luck with the project, regardless of which brand you go with in the end!

[Oliver davies]

You could always buy a 4 port sata card of amazon for about £20 and just use a 1x pci slot as i'm assuming you don't need/want a graphics card?

[BOOZy]

Just a side note: on many motherboards not all SATA ports are available when you populate the M.2 slot.

[NelizMastr]

Why do you want to go freenas specifically? If it's just raw file storage, I'd personally opt for Xpenology. It's a tad more user friendly and offers plenty of functionality.

 

If you're not going to use FreeNAS' vast array of options, I think you'd be better off with Xpenology.