NAS component recommendations

[MadMan3353]

Hey guys quick question. I’m torn between using FreeNAS or unRaid. Question is freeNAS reccomends ECC ram. anyone have any suggestions on a CPU/MOBO combination that’s decent power to price looking for a 4-6core. Mini ITX. If I use unraid I can use pretty much any CPU/MOBO combination. I’m trying to build a small form factor NAS probably around 4-5 drives. For the unRaid set up I was looking at a Coffee lake i5 8400. 

[Windows7ge]

If CPU potential isn't a huge concern you can look into the ASRock C2750D4I. It has ludicrous I/O in a Mini-ITX form factor and 8 cores.

 

UnRAID isn't free.

FreeNAS is.

 

FreeNAS does standard RAID where the data is written across all the disks (Speed benefit at the cost of if too many disks are lost all your data is lost)

 

UnRAID writes whole files to one disk at a time. (Benefit of if a disk is lost you only lose the data from that one disk (if you run out of parody disks) at the cost of you won't have the speed of more than one disk.)

 

UnRAID you can (if you want) mix drives of different speeds and sizes.

 

FreeNAS you want the disks to be as identical as possible (capacity/RPM/cache size)

 

UnRAID has a lot of VM features like hardware pass-through

 

FreeNAS only has standard VM function unless you install VMware (hyperV/ESXi).

 

UnRAID or FreeNAS for a server ECC memory is recommended but isn't a genuine requirement and depending on where you buy it it's not much more expensive than non-ECC.

 

Which one you go with really depends on what you want out of your NAS.