Building/ future proofing a Home server Build

[Davidh373]

Hey, I've become kind of good at this, but i'd like to question a build for FreeNAS. I plan on this being centralized storage and video streaming over a wireless and wired network for a macbook pro, a HP Pavilion, and a Custom built tower. I also have some additional questions.

Is this going to be compatible with Mac and PC?

How much do you think running this 8 - 10 hours a day will cost on my electric bill?

Is a machine like this powerful/ the connection fast enough to stream HD video, and be connected to by multiple users at once?

If I swapped the PSU for something a little more substantial, could I get a Core 2 Quad, a decent G-Card, and some more ram and not have any issues?

Will FreeNAS be faster than a Time Capsule on this machine?

-Celeron 430 LGA 775 35W

-2GB DDR2 667 Ram, 1 stick

-LGA motherboard with X4500 HD on board graphics, supporting 8GB DDR3 (4 x 240 pin) or DDR2 (at any frequency up to 1333), 4 SATA, 1 PATA 1 PCI x16, and 1 PCI x1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-629-_-Product

-WD Caviar Green 1TB 64MB Cache

-380W Antec PSU (would get a 250W, but they don't have 4 SATA Power connecters)

I'm hoping all this is going to hold me over. I don't want my power bill to be more than I'm making with the company lol.

I don't really have a budget. I would only like to see price decrease. Current price is at $336.52 with shipping and tax.

Other Thoughts:

I have a Time Capsule which is infuriating me. It always has access errors and failed transfers. It happens on Win 7 especially, works a little faster with XP and OS X. My point is I figure it's time for an upgrade. I don't feel like I can rely on that, especially with transfer speeds of 10 mb/s wired, and 3 mb/s wireless... We're dealing in HD 1080p, and spending most of our time waiting on stuff to transfer...

I'd like to upgrade this to something I can use as a 3D workstation to render scenes and still be able to work on the side on my custom build. This will be a ways down the road. I am actually helping to start a production company with a friend. We have officially launched, have a few regular clients, and have acquired a 200k budget for a film. I figure in a few years we will upgrade to an actual office and by that time have a real server. I am also hoping to over time insert more drives as they are needed. The case supports 4 3.5" External drives, and 5 3.5" internal, and the PSU has 4 SATA power connecters.

 

[Davidh373]

sorry... this reply was in the wrong thread... man i'm tired lol.

 

[mfenn]

Okaaaaay.

Are you asking about two separate machines?

You don't want to build a NAS that can be upgraded into a 3d workstation.

To answer your questions:

• Yes, freeNAS supports pretty much every filesharing protocol under the sun
• Can tell you without knowing your $/KWH. As a side note, you don't want your server to be coming up and going down all of the time. Whatever you buy, leave it on all the time. You can probably get away with having a 2 drive machine draw ~50W
• Filesharing is super light on the CPU (unless you're talking about 100's of users), the speed will depend mostly on your network connection
• Yes, but why would you want to?
• Yes, FreeNAS running on x86 hardware will be faster than the Time Capsule

I believe you're a little confused right now though. It's quite silly to build a server with the plan to repurpose that machine at a later date. If you want a workstation, build a workstation (chances are that your current desktop would be fine as one though). Think about this, if you were to convert the server to a workstation, what would you do with your files? Would you go back to the Time Capsule?

Think about your plan a little more before you pull the trigger.

 

[Davidh373]

Here's the thing. I was hoping to later turn this into a Core 2 Quad Workstation one day to get a somewhat substantial machine out of something which at that point will be kicked to the curb (i'm thinking in like 3 years), but that is of secondary importance. My current desktop is already much better than the Core 2 Quad machine I may be converting this to in the distant future. My current rig is an i7 920, with 6GB DDR3 1600 ram, and a Radeon 4890.

My current and main concern was the power of the system for a FreeNAS server. Once we (my friend and I, along with a few others) grow out of this space and this server and upgrade to a rack server, I was hoping the Core 2 Quads would not be completely old news and we could use it to render some short scene tests or something. You were right in thinking that was not thought through. I actually thought of that while I was finalizing my list.

Transfer rates are over a Gigabit network at the moment. What might those transfer rates be?

As long as I have my hardware in order and I know it is capable, are there any better freeware alternatives to FreeNAS? I am new to the whole server thing, but I know how to build computers and am quite savoy with new software. If there is anything else that works better, easier, or is fuller featured, I wouldn't be opposed to trying it.

 

[pcgeek11]

Transfer rates are over a Gigabit network at the moment. What might those transfer rates be?

Real world you should be able to get between 50 - 75 MB per second using quality cat 5e or greater cables.

 

[Davidh373]

Real world you should be able to get between 50 - 75 MB per second using quality cat 5e or greater cables.

What about wireless?

 

[Fayd]

What about wireless?

with wireless you get people laughing at you for hosting a file server on wireless.

 

[Davidh373]

with wireless you get people laughing at you for hosting a file server on wireless.

I don't want to host on wireless, I'd like to access the server from a laptop to stream and transfer files. One other thing, I don't think anyone using the server inside my house will be laughing, since I don't see any of the money coming from them . What would they have to complain about?

 

[pcgeek11]

What about wireless?

It depends more on the wireless standard ( IEEE 802.11 a, b, g, n ) than the server etc ... .

 

[rudder]

My home server is an Intel board with Atom 330. It was an early version and the chipset sucks up the juice... but it is like leaving a 40W bulb on. I do not notice it. I threw in a PCI Sata raid card to have some redundancy so all is good.

Just consider if you want to use this server for render jobs and stuff. Likely your main rig will be much faster.. but there are some decent lower power using cpus that spank the atom.

I don't want to host on wireless, I'd like to access the server from a laptop to stream and transfer files. One other thing, I don't think anyone using the server inside my house will be laughing, since I don't see any of the money coming from them . What would they have to complain about?

And my file server is connected to a linksys wrt54g. Have 3 wireless laptops that can pull videos and mp3's off there at the same time with no issue. Not the fastest but there is no stuttering.

 

[mfenn]

Here's the thing. I was hoping to later turn this into a Core 2 Quad Workstation one day to get a somewhat substantial machine out of something which at that point will be kicked to the curb (i'm thinking in like 3 years), but that is of secondary importance. My current desktop is already much better than the Core 2 Quad machine I may be converting this to in the distant future. My current rig is an i7 920, with 6GB DDR3 1600 ram, and a Radeon 4890.

My current and main concern was the power of the system for a FreeNAS server. Once we (my friend and I, along with a few others) grow out of this space and this server and upgrade to a rack server, I was hoping the Core 2 Quads would not be completely old news and we could use it to render some short scene tests or something. You were right in thinking that was not thought through. I actually thought of that while I was finalizing my list.

Transfer rates are over a Gigabit network at the moment. What might those transfer rates be?

As long as I have my hardware in order and I know it is capable, are there any better freeware alternatives to FreeNAS? I am new to the whole server thing, but I know how to build computers and am quite savoy with new software. If there is anything else that works better, easier, or is fuller featured, I wouldn't be opposed to trying it.

Any decent CPU (Atom counts as decent for this use PII's do not) will not be the limiting factor. You will be limited by the GIgE or your HDDs, whichever is slower. The only knock against the Atom for fileserving uses is that mini-ITX boards typically have only 2 SATA ports. The low-power Celeron you picked has a fairly low TDP, so I think you are good there. It will have plenty of CPU power for your uses.

As far as FreeNAS goes, it doesn't do anything that you can't do with a normal Linux or BSD install, but the web interface is quite nice. You have access to pretty much any file sharing protocol that you would want to use. I would advise you to install FreeNAS to a USB stick or CF card, instead of directly to the hard disk. This allows you to swap out the disks as you want. FreeNAS supports pooled storage through ZFS, so you should look into that.

 

[Davidh373]

Any decent CPU (Atom counts as decent for this use PII's do not) will not be the limiting factor. You will be limited by the GIgE or your HDDs, whichever is slower. The only knock against the Atom for fileserving uses is that mini-ITX boards typically have only 2 SATA ports. The low-power Celeron you picked has a fairly low TDP, so I think you are good there. It will have plenty of CPU power for your uses.

As far as FreeNAS goes, it doesn't do anything that you can't do with a normal Linux or BSD install, but the web interface is quite nice. You have access to pretty much any file sharing protocol that you would want to use. I would advise you to install FreeNAS to a USB stick or CF card, instead of directly to the hard disk. This allows you to swap out the disks as you want. FreeNAS supports pooled storage through ZFS, so you should look into that.

That was actually my next question. About the flash drive that is. I was wondering if I could save $20 on the CD/DVD drive, and power consuption that comes along with that.

Here's the thing though. I've used Mac and Windows for a lot of my life, (being an amateur up until about a year ago) but when I attempt to use linux I am COMPLETELY lost. I started using it just for the hell of it and got about as far as installing firefox 3.0 and some free design tools from the program browser. When I got to windows emulation stuff and getting programs to install without the browser it threw me. I've seen the interface for FreeNAS and I can definitely manage, but I wont be able to do much if something goes completely wrong, like if the network driver goes bad. I'm just kind of worried about administrating over an os I'm not familiar with.

The question I have now is if I install FreeNAS on a flash drive, will everything work like it should, easily (with some work within the interface of course)?

 

[mfenn]

That was actually my next question. About the flash drive that is. I was wondering if I could save $20 on the CD/DVD drive, and power consuption that comes along with that.

Here's the thing though. I've used Mac and Windows for a lot of my life, (being an amateur up until about a year ago) but when I attempt to use linux I am COMPLETELY lost. I started using it just for the hell of it and got about as far as installing firefox 3.0 and some free design tools from the program browser. When I got to windows emulation stuff and getting programs to install without the browser it threw me. I've seen the interface for FreeNAS and I can definitely manage, but I wont be able to do much if something goes completely wrong, like if the network driver goes bad. I'm just kind of worried about administrating over an os I'm not familiar with.

The question I have now is if I install FreeNAS on a flash drive, will everything work like it should, easily (with some work within the interface of course)?

With a USB install, you should be able to forgo the optical drive. You basically just need to download the "embedded" image and apply it to your USB stick. This would be done on your Mac or Windows. Then you just boot from USB and you're done.

I wasn't suggesting that you do a normal Linux or BSD install, I was just pointing out that FreeNAS gives you access to all of those resources with a nice Web UI. Don't forget, Mac is BSD. I wouldn't worry about a network driver "going bad," this is BSD we're talking about here.

 

[Davidh373]

With a USB install, you should be able to forgo the optical drive. You basically just need to download the "embedded" image and apply it to your USB stick. This would be done on your Mac or Windows. Then you just boot from USB and you're done.

I wasn't suggesting that you do a normal Linux or BSD install, I was just pointing out that FreeNAS gives you access to all of those resources with a nice Web UI. Don't forget, Mac is BSD. I wouldn't worry about a network driver "going bad," this is BSD we're talking about here.

I do know mac = BSD, but it tends to have an easier UI and more mainstream OS features from what i've heard... anyway thank you for your assurance. If BSD really is that stable I won't worry.

So the hardware seems to be approved by many and low wattage, the software seems simple enough and solid from what I see. Is there anything else you think I should know? Any installation tips or otherwise tips on settings I should do to use the software at its best?

@ PCgeek

I have two N routers at the moment. I have a time capsule (N/G) and a netgear (N/G... and I believe A was mentioned on the package... not important). My MacBook Pro does seem to have a wireless card that supports N.

 

[mfenn]

I do know mac = BSD, but it tends to have an easier UI and more mainstream OS features from what i've heard... anyway thank you for your assurance. If BSD really is that stable I won't worry.

So the hardware seems to be approved by many and low wattage, the software seems simple enough and solid from what I see. Is there anything else you think I should know? Any installation tips or otherwise tips on settings I should do to use the software at its best?

My main advice to you is that you play around with FreeNAS for a bit before you put your real data on there. A VM is a good way to get familiar with the capabilities.

 

[Davidh373]

Excellent. I have space to back up data so I won't lose any if something goes wrong. I have the Time Capsule, a TB hard drive in my workstation, and a usb tb drive.

So what will happen is this (with everything working properly that is):

1. I put FreeNAS on my flash drive

2. My build goes smoothly

3. I plug the usb stick in and boot from it.

4. The server shows up in explorers and finders on the computers in the house?


On another note, this may be important, but this will be my first lone hardware build. I have watched others on the internet and I assisted with building my workstation.

Correct me if I'm wrong and lend me some advice where I might miss something

1. thermal paste gets applied between cpu and socket, and cpu is placed in the motherboard in the marked direction. Then, Ram gets inserted, again of course, in the proper direction.

2. Hard drive bays get removed from the case and motherboard is placed so I/O is facing the back of the case and is screwed into place.

3. Case's power/ reset/ ect. buttons are connected to the mobo.

4. power supply is inserted, switch and female plug facing outward

5. put Hard Drive/ Disk Drive cages back in, and insert hard drives. Plug hard drives into mobo, plug hard drives into power.

6. Close case and boot.

Am I missing anything? I don't want to screw things up.

Also, all the HDDs from newegg.com that are cheaper seem to be bare drives. Do motherboards normally come with a SATA cable, or will I have to buy one?

 

[mfenn]

Excellent. I have space to back up data so I won't lose any if something goes wrong. I have the Time Capsule, a TB hard drive in my workstation, and a usb tb drive.

So what will happen is this (with everything working properly that is):

1. I put FreeNAS on my flash drive

2. My build goes smoothly

3. I plug the usb stick in and boot from it.

4. The server shows up in explorers and finders on the computers in the house?

It's a little more complex than that. The first time you boot the system you'll need a monitor attached so that you can do some initial setup. After that, the system is configured through a web interface (similar to a router). It's at that point that you'll set up shares and everything. Here's a bunch of howto guides to browse.

On another note, this may be important, but this will be my first lone hardware build. I have watched others on the internet and I assisted with building my workstation.

Correct me if I'm wrong and lend me some advice where I might miss something

1. thermal paste gets applied between cpu and socket, and cpu is placed in the motherboard in the marked direction. Then, Ram gets inserted, again of course, in the proper direction.

Thermal paste goes between the CPU and the heatsink, NOT between the CPU and the socket. If you get a Retail Box CPU, it will come with a cooler that has a pad of thermal paste pre-applied. Basically you put the CPU into the socket, take the piece of clear plastic off of the bottom of the heatsink, then attached the heatsink using the pushpins. Your CPU and motherboard manuals will have illustrated instructions.

2. Hard drive bays get removed from the case and motherboard is placed so I/O is facing the back of the case and is screwed into place.

Don't forget to install the motherboard standoffs into the case. Also don't forget to pop the I/O shield that came with the motherboard into the back of the case.

3. Case's power/ reset/ ect. buttons are connected to the mobo.

4. power supply is inserted, switch and female plug facing outward

5. put Hard Drive/ Disk Drive cages back in, and insert hard drives. Plug hard drives into mobo, plug hard drives into power.

Remember to plug the power connectors into the mobo. This is also the point where you would install any expansion cards.

6. Close case and boot.

Am I missing anything? I don't want to screw things up.

Also, all the HDDs from newegg.com that are cheaper seem to be bare drives. Do motherboards normally come with a SATA cable, or will I have to buy one?

Motherboards generally come with a few SATA cables. Newegg normally takes a picture of everything that comes in the mobo box, so count the cables there and make sure that the motherboard comes with enough. Otherwise, yes you will need to buy some.

EDIT: You should go to ASUS's website and download the manual for your mobo. Give that a good read while you wait for UPS to deliver your parts.

 

[Davidh373]

Awesome, Thank you for all the info. I will put it to good use.