Sanity check needed before purchase

[billythekid247]

My movie/TV collection will soon grow past the point that I'm comfortable running it on my desktop, and I figure I should get a dedicated device. New NAS enclosures are pretty pricey when you get past 4 bays, so I figured I'd go the used server route. I found this in my local craigslist and it seems like a decent deal, and 8 hot swap bays is a big selling point for me. ECC is also nice to have for ZFS. I'll be able to add a bit of RAM (4GB included), and the processor (E5-2403) should be good for a single transcode, which is basically all I ever do. I guess I might be able to do a CPU upgrade if that ever changes. The plan would be to populate it with 2 existing WD 4TB Greens and 4-6 new WD 4TB Reds.

 

Possible issues I see:

1. Drive compatibility with the H310 raid controller or backplane
2. Might need a gigabit lan nic
3. Noise/Heat, but I'm not really willing to shell out the $$$ to avoid it.

Anything I'm missing here?

Edited April 3, 2018 by billythekid247
Left out key info

[billythekid247]

6 minutes ago, Alexsolo said:

I don't think you'll be able to upgrade to a H310 Motherboard, those Dell Poweredge's usually have sepcific motherboards mounts and a backplate that isn't removable or not a standard size.

H310 should be capable of RAID 0,1,10

Upgrade motherboard? What do you mean?

[Electronics Wizardy]

47 minutes ago, billythekid247 said:

My movie/TV collection will soon grow past the point that I'm comfortable running it on my desktop, and I figure I should get a dedicated device. New NAS enclosures are pretty pricey when you get past 4 bays, so I figured I'd go the used server route. I found this in my local craigslist and it seems like a decent deal, and 8 hot swap bays is a big selling point for me. ECC is also nice to have for ZFS. I'll be able to add a bit of RAM (4GB included), and the processor (E5-2403) should be good for a single transcode, which is basically all I ever do. I guess I might be able to do a CPU upgrade if that ever changes. The plan would be to populate it with 2 existing WD 4TB Greens and 4-6 new WD 4TB Reds.

 

Possible issues I see:

1. Drive compatibility with the H310 raid controller or backplane
2. Might need a gigabit lan nic
3. Noise/Heat, but I'm not really willing to shell out the $$$ to avoid it.

Anything I'm missing here?

1. All drives should work.

 

2. Has one included, no reason to add anouther.

 

3. no too bad on noise and heat, but you can a good amount better with something like a g4560 build.

 

Ram should be fine, zfs really don't need that much ram, its used as a read cache, like any other os. ECC is always nice, but ZFS does nothing that needs ecc more than any other filesystem.

 

Id look at unraid or btrfs, or mergerfs+snapraid as you can mix drive sizes, which is a pain in zfs.

 

13 minutes ago, Alexsolo said:

I just realized the RAID controller is model # H310 haha,

It's able to support raid 0, 1, 10, 5, 50

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/Documents/dell-perc-h310-spec-sheet.pdf

Here's a PDF on it's capabilities.

 

Depedning on your RAID configuration your drives should be compatible. It's able to support up to 32 drives in a non RAID config otherwise.

He's running ZFS, so no raid is used on the controller, so that won't make a difference at all.