What setup should I build? Input Needed

[MandicReally]

Presently I have a Qnap 2 bay NAS with 2 4TB drives in RAID 1.  It is nearing full rather quickly and I need to expand very soon. My current gameplan is to take my previous system and turn it into a FreeNAS box.  However I'm completely a newbie to RAID arrays and NAS builds here, so sorry if this is very generalized.

 

My plan was to pick up 2 more 4TB drives and expand to a RAID 5 array with the 4 drives I have (12TB).  That would buy me some time to afford a bigger build later. However I cannot see how I would migrate my 4TB of data from the current RAID 1 to a RAID 5 (yes I know FreeNAS is ZFS).  Will I have to get another drive to backup my 4TB to?  I can but if I can avoid it I'd like to.  Or is there a better configuration I should aim for?  I want 12-16TB. I have almost filled 4TBs in about 9 months so 12-16 should get me through 2019 at this rate. 

Also I may as well list the System Specs of my planned build so folks can tell me if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

 

AMD FX-6300 (I plan to under clock and undervolt it as much as makes sense to reduce power consumption.)

-Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P (6 Sata ports and plan to use Onboard raid

-Cheap small SSD for boot drive

-4 Western Digital Red 4TB 5400RPM drives

-Intel 2x 1Gig RJ45 NIC (Link Aggregate the two ports to increase transfer speeds.

-32 GB 1866 DDR3 ECC Ram (Not certain that my motherboard supports ECC, I can't find verification, but I can get it fairly affordably so if it works, great.)

-Whatever cheap graphics card I can get to get through install.

 

My use case is just backups.  I edit 4K video footage for my YouTube channel and save everything I shoot.  I just need a place to store finished project files and to be able to pull them back up for future needs. That is all. I could see maybe throwing in another drive for a Media server but that isn't priority. I have the CPU and motherboard, so that's the driving force behind those choices.  I configured other setups but it just seemed to make sense to use what I have.

 

Any help is appreciated.  I know I'm being broad but I just don't know what I don't know afterall. 

[MandicReally]

I should note that the only goals I have here is increasing my storage vs my current Qnap and increasing data transfer rates.  My Current Qnap transfers at like 50-70 MBps and I really want to try and get better speeds.  I hate my Qnap.  Every single time I access it, it wants to update something and it takes forever to be done with those.  Its tiresome and just not worth the aggravation I think.

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, MandicReally said:

Will I have to get another drive to backup my 4TB to?  I can but if I can avoid it I'd like to.  Or is there a better configuration I should aim for? 

Yep you will need anouther drive to copy the files to. You should already have a backup of all your data though.

 

15 minutes ago, MandicReally said:

Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P (6 Sata ports and plan to use Onboard raid

Don't use onboard raid, esp with freenas. You have good software raid you can use here than much better than motherboard raid.

 

15 minutes ago, MandicReally said:

Intel 2x 1Gig RJ45 NIC (Link Aggregate the two ports to increase transfer speeds.

Really won't help unless you have multiple clients, Id go 10gbe point to point if you want more speed.

 

15 minutes ago, MandicReally said:

MD FX-6300 (I plan to under clock and undervolt it as much as makes sense to reduce power consumption.)

It is still a power hungry platform. If you live in a place with high power costs Id consider swapping it. Under volting will help a bit. Don't under clock, the chip already does that and the core is basically off with c states anyways.

 

16 minutes ago, MandicReally said:

32 GB 1866 DDR3 ECC Ram (Not certain that my motherboard supports ECC, I can't find verification, but I can get it fairly affordably so if it works, great.)

What type of ecc? registered won't work here.

 

You really don't need 32gb,  8gb will be fine here.

 

 

[MandicReally]

Cool those are the kinds of pointers I need. As I was typing this up I thought that I should just get a 4Tb external drive for a backup. I can just save my finished projects to that and it won't fill up nearly as fast. That will allow me to migrate everything and then use it for that backup purpose afterward. 

 

I was unaware of registered being an issue but I see that now. 8Gb of Unbuffered ECC is attainable. Or I could just skip and go to non-ECC as I'm not even sure it's going to function properly. 

 

Most lists I found said to run 1Gb per TB of storage. I'm assuming that's maybe for more intensive tasks than my needs though? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, MandicReally said:

I was unaware of registered being an issue but I see that now. 8Gb of Unbuffered ECC is attainable. Or I could just skip and go to non-ECC as I'm not even sure it's going to function properly. 

Non-ecc will work fine, and ecc probably won't make a difference. The board probably wont work with ecc enabled, but it really depends on the board.

 

1 minute ago, MandicReally said:

Most lists I found said to run 1Gb per TB of storage. I'm assuming that's maybe for more intensive tasks than my needs though?

That estimate is kinda bs, you really don't need much ram, even 4gb is fine. Things like dedup need tons of ram,

 

 

[Robertoal]

This is a good read -> although it is from 2015 so maybe things are different now?

 

TLDR:

- FreeNAS needs at least 8gb

- Using less then 8gb can cause various issues

- It uses all of the memory as default because of caching