FreeNAS hardware recommendation

[cuti7399]

I've been using Dlink NAS for about 2years. Now I want to step up and build my own FreeNAS box. I'm kind new to this. So asking for help

1. which mobo and cpu to get? atom ok?
2. should I buy a pci-e raid card or can I use software raid? I have 4x1tb drives and want to use raid5 with room for upgrading later.
3. i'd like to have bit-torrent, DLNA, itunes server support.

Thanks for any suggestion/inputs

 

[AE-Ruffy]

Hardware, get what you want as long as it loads freebsd. Atom is ok but i'd rather go with an Core i3, especially if you're going to torrent. I3 2100 is fantastic for this and would still keep the power usage low.

Forget hardware raid or raid 5, get 8-16gbs of memory and use ZFS

Plenty of raid cards out there work, just understand that you want a software solution for this so they wont be doing any processing(Ignore the expensive raid controllers)

 

[billyb0b]

go with a dedicated hardware controller, skip atom and get a SB celeron, or even an i3 if you like

 

[cuti7399]

i3 it is then. more on raid please!
thanks

 

[Tennoh]

I'm building myself DIY NAS4Free (Freenas7 fork based on FreeBSD9) and I basically selected a low end Sandybridge Celeron G530 with a Z77 mobo. I chose an Asrock Z77 Extreme4 for its builtin 8 SATA ports and 4 DIMM sockets. For now I've also added 2xASM1061 SATA3 controllers as well. I've loaded it with 4x8GB Crucial non-ECC sticks. For ZFS you want maximum RAM you can afford with no RAID configured controllers; ZFS has its own built-in RAID functionality. In future I'll recycle an old SSD used elsewhere as a cache disk and maybe another for a ZIL device. I plan to have 1x12disk 2TB 5900rpm pool as a start in ZFS raidz2 configuration. Should be building this in next couple weeks.

 

[RaiderJ]

See the link in my sig for my file server build log. I went with OpenIndiana (Solaris), but from a hardware perspective you could easily run FreeNAS instead.

 

[RaiderJ]

2. should I buy a pci-e raid card or can I use software raid? I have 4x1tb drives and want to use raid5 with room for upgrading later.

I specifically went with ZFS because I wanted to be able to upgrade my drives on the fly. Just swap out one drive at a time, and have the array auto-expand when completed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I need some Linux NAS platform help too. I had a 500GB IDE NAS fail on me, it is a "Gigabit NAS", otherwise known as an NS-349. Pretty cheap generic box.

I have four 1TB Seagate 7200RPM HDs. I also have an older NF4/A64-based computer, that I was originally looking to get rid of. I think that the mobo has four SATA ports.

Would there be a free *nix distro that I could run on this rig, with the four HDs added, that would allow me to try out ZFS, and supports SMB/CIFS networked file-shares?

 

[RaiderJ]

I need some Linux NAS platform help too. I had a 500GB IDE NAS fail on me, it is a "Gigabit NAS", otherwise known as an NS-349. Pretty cheap generic box.

I have four 1TB Seagate 7200RPM HDs. I also have an older NF4/A64-based computer, that I was originally looking to get rid of. I think that the mobo has four SATA ports.

Would there be a free *nix distro that I could run on this rig, with the four HDs added, that would allow me to try out ZFS, and supports SMB/CIFS networked file-shares?

OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana is free, and combined with the napp-it add-on it makes a great storage backend. Solaris isn't the most user friendly, which is why FreeNAS is so popular. Either should support SMB/CIFS just fine (does for me).