Black Friday FreeNAS build

[aphelion02]

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing.

I want a headless file server for storage and streaming. Must be accessible to both my openelec-xbmc htpc as well as my main Win7 PC. Will also be employed for torrent duty. Only 6-8TB of capacity needed right now, but I want 6 SATA slots for future expandability.

My plan is to run a FreeNAS with ZFS on it., however I will consider advice to the contrary. A good looking enclosure in the style of some of the Lian Li or Fractal ones is also desired.

2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread

$500.

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.

USA

4. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc.

None, but had bad experiences with seagate in the past.

5. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.

I will find a solution for the harddrives.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.

Default of course.

8. What resolution will you be using?

n/a. Headless unit.

9. WHEN do you plan to build it?
Note that it is usually not cost or time effective to choose your build more than a month before you actually plan to be using it.

All parts should be bought by Cyber Monday.

X. Do you need to purchase any software to go with the system, such as Windows or Blu Ray playback software?

No. FreeNAS hopefully, also considering Ubuntu .

I've never had a file server before, and would like some help picking up most optimal parts. I'm looking for not so much specific part lists (though those would be appreciated as well), as I anticipate picking most of them up between Black Friday

 

[mfenn]

Well, 8 TB is $400 worth of drives right there, leaving $200 for the rest of the machine. You will want a separate device for your root partition, but that can be a USB key since you're doing FreeNAS.

This is the cheapest that I could get an 8TB (6TB usable) machine while meeting your other requirements.

Celeron G530 $49
ASRock H77M $60
Kingston DDR3 1333 4GB $20
Seagate 7200RPM 2TB x4 $400
4GB USB drive $6
Corsair CX430 $35 AR
Lian-Li PC-K65 $50 AP
Total: $620 AR AP

As you can see, I blew the budget by $20, which is honestly a lot closer than I was expecting to get. You could get it under $600 by using some cheap CM Elite case.

 

[aphelion02]

Yikes, I just took a look at the budget and realized that I forgot the cost of the hard drives. I guess I can exclude those for now from the cost of the system - new budget is $500, sans drives - much more reasonable I'm thinking yorur build but with double the ram and maybe a pentium.

Of course, now I am wondering if I should just go for a synology solution, or maybe convert my i3-2100 htpc to the NAS and go for a cheaper machine for XBMC. Decisions decisions....

 

[mfenn]

FreeNAS doesn't really need that much RAM. RAM is cheap and ZFS will use any extra RAM for the ARC, so why not. Adding a little CPU horsepower is fine too.

I would put the majority of the extra money towards a 128GB SSD like the Samsung 830. Don't put the OS there (keep that on the USB key), but instead use the SSD as a ZIL (ZFS Intent Log, basically a write cache) and L2ARC (read cache, think SRT but better).

 

[halw]

I've been contemplating doing something similar and trying to decide whether to buy or build. Following is what I've come up with, so far <$400.

- LIAN LI PC-Q08B Black Aluminum Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case
- ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 (1.0GHz, dual core) AMD Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
- SeaSonic S12II 380B 380W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
- Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model KVR1066D3N7K2/8G
- Western Digital Red WD10EFRX 1TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

All components priced through Newegg. Would us FreeNas OS.

Still not sure if I should move forward or look at one of the inexpensive 'Personal Cloud' storage devices out there.

 

[mfenn]

I've been contemplating doing something similar and trying to decide whether to buy or build. Following is what I've come up with, so far <$400.

- LIAN LI PC-Q08B Black Aluminum Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case
- ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 (1.0GHz, dual core) AMD Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
- SeaSonic S12II 380B 380W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
- Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model KVR1066D3N7K2/8G
- Western Digital Red WD10EFRX 1TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

All components priced through Newegg. Would us FreeNas OS.

Still not sure if I should move forward or look at one of the inexpensive 'Personal Cloud' storage devices out there.

FreeNAS needs several hard drives to really be worthwhile IMHO. With only 1 or 2 drives, you're better off with a consumer NAS box.

 

[Blueychan]

FreeNAS needs several hard drives to really be worthwhile IMHO. With only 1 or 2 drives, you're better off with a consumer NAS box.

+1

You won't see the savings over consumer NAS (synology, QNAP, etc.) until 4+ drives ...

 

[Fallen Kell]

FreeNAS doesn't really need that much RAM. RAM is cheap and ZFS will use any extra RAM for the ARC, so why not. Adding a little CPU horsepower is fine too.

ZFS most definitely will benefit from more RAM, as well as a small, dedicated, SSDs. If you really need performance, get 3 (2 will be mirrored for use as the ZFS ZIL log, and 1 as L2ARC)). But even just having 1 for the ZIL will make a huge difference in performance. And have I said, get more RAM? I don't think I said that yet. I mean, when the first 3 things listed in Oracles performance guides for ZFS are titled "1) Have enough RAM", "2) Add more RAM", and "3) Add even more RAM"....

And if you plan on using ZFS data de-duplication features to keep from storing the same data multiple times (saving space and performance), you really, REALLY want more RAM. For instance with 8k blocks (not standard by the way, but could be configured), you would need 32GB RAM per 1TB of hard drive space! At 64k blocks, you still need 4GB, and that is just to hold the de-dup lookup table. You still need the other RAM for everything else ZFS uses RAM for (read/write cache, etc).

 

[mfenn]

ZFS most definitely will benefit from more RAM, as well as a small, dedicated, SSDs. If you really need performance, get 3 (2 will be mirrored for use as the ZFS ZIL log, and 1 as L2ARC)). But even just having 1 for the ZIL will make a huge difference in performance. And have I said, get more RAM? I don't think I said that yet. I mean, when the first 3 things listed in Oracles performance guides for ZFS are titled "1) Have enough RAM", "2) Add more RAM", and "3) Add even more RAM"....

And if you plan on using ZFS data de-duplication features to keep from storing the same data multiple times (saving space and performance), you really, REALLY want more RAM. For instance with 8k blocks (not standard by the way, but could be configured), you would need 32GB RAM per 1TB of hard drive space! At 64k blocks, you still need 4GB, and that is just to hold the de-dup lookup table. You still need the other RAM for everything else ZFS uses RAM for (read/write cache, etc).

Yes, that's what I said, "ZFS will use any extra RAM for the ARC, so why not." The features you listed are certainly cool, but lets be realistic here. A $500 setup doesn't have the money to be spending on three SSDs.

Oh BTW, ZFS ZIL is kind of redundant since ZIL stands for ZFS Intent Log.