Home storage/media server

[Chalkywoods]

I'm looking to build a NAS for family pictures, videos etc, as well as backups of our individual PCs. I want it to be as reliable as possible but it will probably only be accessed a few times a week so it won't be doing work 24/7. In the future I'd also like to run a plex server on it but that's not the main focus.

 

So far I've been looking at a freeNAS machine with 4x4tb drives in RAID-Z1, so 12tb available storage. I've found the MSI MS-S0891 new for around £80 on ebay. It's got dual Gbe, which should be all we need, supports 16gb ddr3 ECC memory (1gb per tb as freenas suggests) and has 5 sata connectors, enough for this configuration. It also has a PCIe x16 slot in case we want to add more sata ports later. Going with current generation parts is probably over our budget, are there any massive downsides with using ddr3? The RAM would be second hand on ebay but I'd stress test before, and it comes with lifetime warranty. Some of the sata ports are only 3gb/s but I gather that's fine for mechanical drives?

 

The i3-4130T 2.9Ghz Dual-Core is listed as compatible on the motherboard page, is available for as low as £40 on ebay and has a tdp of only 35w. I'm hoping with a decent cooler it can run passive most of the time and therefore silent. The Plex page suggests a CPU with passmark score of 2000 for a 1080p stream so this should be sufficient.

 

The case will be a Norco ITX-S4, small and inconspicuous and fits the perfect number of drives. It has a 6gb/s backplane, and this might be a stupid question, but will that work fine with the 3gb/s ports on the motherboard?

 

As the server will probably go a few days at a time without use I want to spin all the drives down after a few hours. This forum post says you can't spin down the volume with the system dataset on, so I want to include an SSD for this purpose. Can I run the OS from this as well?

I've tried to do my research and I'm quite happy with the system, is there anything I've missed or should be worried about? Provided it doesn't fill up, is this build likely to last a while?

Thanks in advance!

[Electronics Wizardy]

36 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

so I want to include an SSD for this purpose. Can I run the OS from this as well?

Id just use   usb stick for the os, or 2 if you want redunancy.

 

36 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

It has a 6gb/s backplane, and this might be a stupid question, but will that work fine with the 3gb/s ports on the motherboard?

It will work fine.

 

37 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

The i3-4130T 2.9Ghz Dual-Core is listed as compatible on the motherboard page, is available for as low as £40 on ebay and has a tdp of only 35w. I'm hoping with a decent cooler it can run passive most of the time and therefore silent. The Plex page suggests a CPU with passmark score of 2000 for a 1080p stream so this should be sufficient.

Id get a 4130 or non t sku if its the same price, both idle at the same power, its just the the non t sku can clock higher(you can change this too in the os or bios.

 

For cooling, id just use the stock cooler personally, it will be silent with this cpu(ive used it), and airflow is a bit low in this case, so it will stuggle with a passive cooler

 

39 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

(1gb per tb as freenas suggests)

That is bs, you can get away with much less, its just using ram as a read cache, so 8gb is fine and what id personally get.

 

40 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

The RAM would be second hand on ebay

Make sure you get unbuffered ecc, its more expensive, but this board don't support registered ecc, which is the cheap ddr3 dimms.

 

42 minutes ago, Chalkywoods said:

4x4tb drives in RAID-Z1, so 12tb available storage.

Depending on pricing and what you need in the future, id probably go 2x 8 or 2x10tb and then expand in the future, lower power, can grow much easier and often cheaper per gb.

[Chalkywoods]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That is bs, you can get away with much less, its just using ram as a read cache, so 8gb is fine and what id personally get.

 

Make sure you get unbuffered ecc, its more expensive, but this board don't support registered ecc, which is the cheap ddr3 dims.

Thanks, didn't notice the ram was registered! 8gb unbuffered is a similar price so ill go with that.

 

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id get a 4130 or non t sku if its the same price, both idle at the same power, its just the the non t sku can clock higher(you can change this too in the os or bios.

 

For cooling, id just use the stock cooler personally, it will be silent with this cpu(ive used it), and airflow is a bit low in this case, so it will stuggle with a passive cooler

The non t is slightly cheaper, I'm not sure how I missed the higher clock. the main concern is power at idle so ill probably go with that and the stock cooler

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

[jde3]

You can get away with less ram, all it will affect is ZFS's performance. 8gb prob is ok if on the low side.

 

About ECC:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271

 

That's Matt Ahrens, he wrote it so he would know. Yes, its good.. but required? well... depends how much you like your data.