FREENAS/Plex machine , Upgrade

[Knux]

Hello , good day to you fellow LTTForum dwellers i seek wisdom of the experienced freenas builders.

 

This is my baby: only one user my smart tv at home

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/knux03/saved/QkJ8YJ

 

1.Main task: is to deliver home videos of my trips with my wife and showcase home videos with the family.

2.Issue: i want to upgrade my storage.

         Problem A: Ram i have a seller coming in for the holidays "cousin" ho has a 16 gig ram "LINK"  ecc that works perfectly with it but hes asking 120 bucks im not gonna lie its a great price

         Problem B: The green , its the green, its the green, its the green I NEED!!! to bu another drive in black friday .

3.Epiphany: I could use more storage in my Nas/plex Freenas only needs 8gb to work and i have 16 ecc.

        Reverse Epiphany: nas needs 1g per terabyte to work zfs .... #@!#$+*.

4.Help: what can i do ?can my plex server  work with 16gb of ram and 26 terabytes of storage? ... Storage "LINK"

[AbsoluteFool]

3 minutes ago, Knux said:

Hello , good day to you fellow LTTForum dwellers i seek wisdom of the experienced freenas builders.

 

This is my baby: only one user my smart tv at home

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/knux03/saved/QkJ8YJ

 

1.Main task: is to deliver home videos of my trips with my wife and showcase home videos with the family.

2.Issue: i want to upgrade my storage.

         Problem A: Ram i have a seller coming in for the holidays "cousin" ho has a 16 gig ram "LINK"  ecc that works perfectly with it but hes asking 120 bucks im not gonna lie its a great price

         Problem B: The green , its the green, its the green, its the green I NEED!!! to bu another drive in black friday .

3.Epiphany: I could use more storage in my Nas/plex Freenas only needs 8gb to work and i have 16 ecc.

        Reverse Epiphany: nas needs 1g per terabyte to work zfs .... #@!#$+*.

4.Help: what can i do ?can my plex server  work with 16gb of ram and 26 terabytes of storage? ... Storage "LINK"

1. Great idea!

2. problem A: 16gig for 120 bucks sounds horrible!

Problem B: Get a new drive no problem

3: This is a myth! FreeNAS does not need 1GB RAM for every 1TB storage. The more the better they say, but it's not an requirement.

4. Your server will be fine without more RAM.

[Electronics Wizardy]

B: for the drive, Id get one of those 10gb easy stores

 

You don't need 1gb per tb, thats a myth. You can run that system on 8gb just fine. The extra ram is just there mostly as a read cache, and while more is better, it won't help much here.

 

Just add more drives, no need to touch ram.

[Firewrath9]

16gb of ram for 120$? not a great price you can get 16 for 100$ new. if it's ECC, make sure its unbuffered. Also ECC is useless for a nas.

 

Dont use external HDDs as they are slower and more expensive.

[Knux]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

B: for the drive, Id get one of those 10gb easy stores

 

You don't need 1gb per tb, thats a myth. You can run that system on 8gb just fine. The extra ram is just there mostly as a read cache, and while more is better, it won't help much here.

 

Just add more drives, no need to touch ram.

clearly you didn't see the link of the storage....

[Knux]

3 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

16gb of ram for 120$? not a great price you can get 16 for 100$ new. if it's ECC, make sure its unbuffered. Also ECC is useless for a nas.

 

Dont use external HDDs as they are slower and more expensive.

these are red nas drives they are not connected there are inside the the rig

and yes all 16 gigs are unbuffered ecc

[AbsoluteFool]

2 minutes ago, Knux said:

these are red nas drives they are not connected there are inside the the rig

just one question for you.. Why are you buying external HDD enclosures if you're just gonna pull out the drives? Wouldn't just the drive be cheaper?

[Knux]

1 minute ago, AbsoluteFool said:

just one question for you.. Why are you buying external HDD enclosures if you're just gonna pull out the drives? Wouldn't just the drive be cheaper?

8tb rd nas drives ARE YOU KIDDING!!! i bought them on two different best buys and the only had one left in each of them by that time 8tb red drives where around 300 or so usd these were affordable back then with the red nas drives fever when western digital was using red nas drives on there easy store external drives.

[Electronics Wizardy]

53 minutes ago, Knux said:

clearly you didn't see the link of the storage....

OOPS missed that.

 

Also do you need freenas. Id switch to something like unraid or another system so you can easily swap drives all, as zfs doesn't let you expand a raidz.
 

How is your zpool setup now?

[Knux]

49 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

OOPS missed that.

 

Also do you need freenas. Id switch to something like unraid or another system so you can easily swap drives all, as zfs doesn't let you expand a raidz.
 

How is your zpool setup now?

8tb mirroring 8tb ... i know bad choise everybody keeps telling me mirrored vdev with no other drives i suicide.

 

and another thing i curent have a sanddisk pendrive with freenas installed and your saying that im better of with unraid and plex than freenas?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Knux said:

8tb mirroring 8tb ... i know bad choise everybody keeps telling me mirrored vdev with no other drives i suicide.

 

and another thing i curent have a sanddisk pendrive with freenas installed and your saying that im better of with unraid and plex than freenas?

 

Id probably go unraid or anouther linux distro than freenas, that way you can easily expand. Otherwise you need to wipe and restart with freenas if you just want to add one 10tb. You can also do this with btrfs on linux or storage spaces in windows.

[Jarsky]

7 hours ago, AbsoluteFool said:

just one question for you.. Why are you buying external HDD enclosures if you're just gonna pull out the drives? Wouldn't just the drive be cheaper?

 

It's cheaper to get white label drives out of the WD EasyStores than to buy individual hard drives. the only downside is they dont have TLER and you may need to "mod" them because of the 3.3V pin (tape over the pin) if you're direct attaching them rather than a backplane

[Knux]

13 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

It's cheaper to get white label drives out of the WD EasyStores than to buy individual hard drives. the only downside is they dont have TLER and you may need to "mod" them because of the 3.3V pin (tape over the pin) if you're direct attaching them rather than a backplane

i know thats why i bought the molex cables without knowing the cables worked perfectly

[Knux]

17 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably go unraid or anouther linux distro than freenas, that way you can easily expand. Otherwise you need to wipe and restart with freenas if you just want to add one 10tb. You can also do this with btrfs on linux or storage spaces in windows.

Ok, so what would you recommend im probably buying a couple 10tb drives + my 16 that gives me 36tb with my actual ram 16gb  what linux and configuration would be better? take in mind that i want to use plex. a guide would be nice

[Electronics Wizardy]

28 minutes ago, Knux said:

Ok, so what would you recommend im probably buying a couple 10tb drives + my 16 that gives me 36tb with my actual ram 16gb  what linux and configuration would be better? take in mind that i want to use plex. a guide would be nice

Unraid is the easy way here. Good web interface, easy to expand, easy to use. Give it a shot.

[Knux]

22 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Unraid is the easy way here. Good web interface, easy to expand, easy to use. Give it a shot.

Its a paid service right? is it a one time thing or monthly ?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Knux said:

Its a paid service right? is it a one time thing or monthly ?

one time cost. You can do the same thing your self in linux with some scripting and cron jobs, but unraid does it all for you with a pretty gui.

[Knux]

16 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

one time cost. You can do the same thing your self in linux with some scripting and cron jobs, but unraid does it all for you with a pretty gui.

ok , ive danced with the unix devil a long time a go ... i can manage.

[Knux]

On another note what can you guys recommend for a display just to monitor the server? i don't want a huge monitor just enough to know is up... phrasing

5 to 7 inch display i know there is raspberry pi display but just the display i want the entire thing

@Firewrath9
@AbsoluteFool
@Jarsky  
@Electronics Wizardy

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 11/19/2018 at 4:59 AM, Knux said:

On another note what can you guys recommend for a display just to monitor the server? i don't want a huge monitor just enough to know is up... phrasing

5 to 7 inch display i know there is raspberry pi display but just the display i want the entire thing

@Firewrath9
@AbsoluteFool
@Jarsky  
@Electronics Wizardy

 

Don't bother with a screen, you won't need it, just ssh or use a web interface.

 

 

[dalekphalm]

On 11/14/2018 at 5:19 PM, Knux said:

3.Epiphany: I could use more storage in my Nas/plex Freenas only needs 8gb to work and i have 16 ecc.

        Reverse Epiphany: nas needs 1g per terabyte to work zfs .... #@!#$+*.

This is incorrect. It's a myth that has been propogated for years in the FreeNAS community.

 

1GB of RAM per 1TB of Storage is only required if you are using Deduplication. Standard ZFS arrays will not benefit from that extra RAM.

 

But since the ZFS Deduplication feature is kind of shitty anyway, and the performance hit is pretty bad, there's basically no reason to use it. So don't.

 

TL;DR:

Get more HDD's. Don't get more RAM. 16GB is already overkill for FreeNAS.

[dalekphalm]

On 11/14/2018 at 5:25 PM, Firewrath9 said:

Also ECC is useless for a nas.

Incorrect - he's using FreeNAS, which runs ZFS. ZFS loves ECC RAM. It's not required, but heavily recommended. Why? Because the bit-rot scrubbing in ZFS works on the basis that it implicitly trusts what's in RAM. It assumes that data in RAM is good.

 

Certainly not useless. But for home users, probably not a big deal either. It's one of those things where if you can afford ECC, go for it. Otherwise, no big deal.

On 11/14/2018 at 5:25 PM, Firewrath9 said:

Dont use external HDDs as they are slower and more expensive.

Typically, this is actually bad advice. External HDD's are almost always cheaper for larger capacities. Furthermore, because they're more of a regular consumer commodity, they get larger and steeper sales, more frequently.

 

Additionally, a lot of the larger External HDD's will have NAS grade drives inside (Seagate IronWolf, WD Red, etc).

On 11/14/2018 at 5:30 PM, AbsoluteFool said:

just one question for you.. Why are you buying external HDD enclosures if you're just gonna pull out the drives? Wouldn't just the drive be cheaper?

It's actually generally cheaper to buy External HDD's and pull them out of the enclosures. There's some amount of gambling in that you're never 100% sure what HDD you'll get, but often you get really good ones like Red's or IronWolf.

On 11/19/2018 at 7:59 AM, Knux said:

On another note what can you guys recommend for a display just to monitor the server? i don't want a huge monitor just enough to know is up... phrasing

5 to 7 inch display i know there is raspberry pi display but just the display i want the entire thing

@Firewrath9
@AbsoluteFool
@Jarsky  
@Electronics Wizardy

 

Literally the only thing the monitor would show is the main menu terminal, with a list of menu options, and the server IP Address. It doesn't show anything useful at all. No live data, etc. If you want to monitor it, bring up the Web GUI on a tab on your actual computer.

[Jarsky]

I have an old flatscreen 15" 4:3 i got for free that someone was going to throw out just for plugging into my servers if i need to access them locally. 

mainly because it fits in my server cupboard with a small 87key keyboard. Its mostly just there for doing upgrades and because i have a hardware raid

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, Jarsky said:

I have an old flatscreen 15" 4:3 i got for free that someone was going to throw out just for plugging into my servers if i need to access them locally. 

mainly because it fits in my server cupboard with a small 87key keyboard. Its mostly just there for doing upgrades and because i have a hardware raid

Yeah I'm using my old 19" widescreen LCD for the same purpose hooked up to my ESXi server. Good to have it for initial setup, RAID Card management, and the odd time you need to go into the local terminal to change a setting or something.

 

But 99% of the time, the monitor is just switched off because I simply rarely ever need to use it.

[Knux]

Funny thing just happen ... my mobo died ... pc part picker is not giving me any alternative below 100 bucks ... and gigabyte hasn't respond to my emails , the ebay seller told me it had 180 days warranty... 

 

any good mobo died what pc part picker that would work with the same ram  and cpu mini itx or micro atx same case if possible i dont want to buy a new case.