HOME NAS Advice

[thtadthtshldntbe]

So between my bonus and a nice Christmas gift or two, I have decided to put together a home NAS.

I am going to use FreeNAS.

My question is about the system.

My current desktop consists of

MSI 7750 (Z68)
i3 2100
8GB

Now I know the i3 video is more than enough for NAS purposes.

So I can either buy an IB i5 for this rig and upgrade it for desktop use, or treat myself to a new haswell based rig (though I might have to stick with my AMD 5850, which is more than fine for my gaming purposes, though getting something less noisy would be nice).

So my question is, would repurposing my desktop CPU+mobo+ram be ok for a decent NAS in terms of both power use and functionality.

I know that I would ahve to buy another boot SSD and the storage drives.

 

[smitbret]

That i3 would be great. 65W TDP can be beaten, but at the price of free-ninety-free, I wouldn't blink twice. It will be almost overkill as far as CPU power.

Depending on how much storage you are going with, ZFS is happiest under the guideline 1GB per TB of storage.

 

[cbn]

So between my bonus and a nice Christmas gift or two, I have decided to put together a home NAS.

I am going to use FreeNAS.

My question is about the system.

My current desktop consists of

MSI 7750 (Z68)
i3 2100
8GB

Now I know the i3 video is more than enough for NAS purposes.

So I can either buy an IB i5 for this rig and upgrade it for desktop use, or treat myself to a new haswell based rig (though I might have to stick with my AMD 5850, which is more than fine for my gaming purposes, though getting something less noisy would be nice).

So my question is, would repurposing my desktop CPU+mobo+ram be ok for a decent NAS in terms of both power use and functionality.

If you are going to use ZFS with FreeNAS, using ECC RAM is highly recommended:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#RAM

WARNING: to ensure consistency for the checksumming and parity calculations performed by ZFS, ECC RAM is highly recommended. Using non-ECC RAM can cause unrecoverable damage to a zpool resulting in a loss of all data in the pool.

Some more info:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/

If you aren't detail oriented and don't want to understand what is going on deep level in ZFS, then just go with ECC RAM. For those of you that want to understand just how destructive non-ECC RAM can be, keep reading.

...So based on that I would look for another CPU, mobo and RAM (ECC).

I know that I would ahve to buy another boot SSD and the storage drives.

According to the documentation, a usb stick of at least 2GB capacity will also work for the boot device. (That should save you some money and free up another SATA port for the storage drives)

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#Compact_or_USB_Flash

The FreeNAS® operating system is a running image. This means that it should not be installed onto a hard drive, but rather to a USB or compact flash device that is at least 2 GB in size. If you don't have compact flash, you can instead use a USB thumb drive that is dedicated to the running image and which stays inserted in the USB slot.

 

[thtadthtshldntbe]

And that's why I ask first before I buy. I did not even think much about the ECC issue.

If I want to use my cpu I need a whole new motherboard and ram for it. If it was just buying 16GB of ECC ram, i would do that.

So it looks like, baring any further input, I will go IB cpu upgrade in this machine and put together a new mobo/cpu/ram combo for the NAS.

The only thing I don't like about running it off a flash drive is that I would have to hardware mod to make the flash drive inside the case, which is not difficult, I dislike having a usb flash drive just sticking out of my case being integral to the system running.

edit, though it looks like I still might be able to repurpose my i3 in the NAS build.

 

[Cerb]

Since Intel has kept ECC as a server (and embedded) feature, the platform and RAM costs increase your costs a good bit, so whether it is worth it is a difficult question to answer. If it's not on the boxes creating or editing those files, how much are really getting by having it on the file server? Especially given the low utilization that a home NAS will receive.

The only thing I don't like about running it off a flash drive is that I would have to hardware mod to make the flash drive inside the case, which is not difficult, I dislike having a usb flash drive just sticking out of my case being integral to the system running.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/9-10-Pin-Mo..._USB_Cables_Hubs_Adapters&hash=item19e1bd7886
You'd just have to buy something like one of the above adapters, and use the mobo's USB port headers. Can you say, "USB RAID one," three times fast?

 

[cbn]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/9-10-Pin-Mo..._USB_Cables_Hubs_Adapters&hash=item19e1bd7886
You'd just have to buy something like one of the above adapters, and use the mobo's USB port headers. Can you say, "USB RAID one," three times fast?

Awesome find. I didn't know those existed till you posted.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I'm really happy with freeNas....I've used it for quite a few years for work NAS devices from a bunch of old servers that were going to the recycle heap.

At home, I decided to go with a QNAP NAS. I wanted a RAID device with an extra small formfactor and one that used minimum power. I think it's rated at 13 watts.... I got the TS-212 for arouned $170 and threw a couple of 2TB drives in it. I had one of the WD Green drives I used go bad recently and replaced it with a Red. I had zero data loss, but powered the unit down before replacing the drive. (I didn't want to crack the case while it was running though I probably could)

 

[thtadthtshldntbe]

The thing is, to build something that has a say 4 drive capacity to start with and having further expandability even with the ECC and server board costs, seems like you are going to pay 500 or so to begin with anyway. Not counting drives. That seems to be the general thing or one of them anyway, that I get reading through these threads in here.

Plus configuring the device would give me some actual experience in that area (I am currently the sysadmin/application specialist for my division EMR at my hospital. Its a sort of combo IT/Informatics/admin job, but going forward I want to get out of the administration part (payroll, scheduling etc) and concentrate on the IT/Informatics part as work on my degree. My general sense is that either you have a job like I have now, with one foot in IT/Informatics and the other in hosp Admin or you have both feet in the IT/Informatics part and get other responsibilities besides just your application specialty handed to you.)

Anyway, So long as the case fits in about 15 inches, I have several heavy duty plastic utility shelves that I keep my home equipment on. So space is not that much of an issue.

... and my gift of my self to myself has arrived... my 3570k cpu is here today....

So reusing my i3 in come capacity, which seems viable from everything I have read, is a plus.