Please help me build a FreeNAS box.

[ibex333]

So far I only got two cases: Fractal Design Node 304 and Cooler Master CM690

I really don't care for the "pretty" factor, so I am thinking to use the CM690 for the FreeNAS and Node for my main PC.

I already have the PSU and possibly the RAM... The hard drives are a non issue also, but they are all different capacities. Some are 1TB some are 2 and 3TB.. Not sure how that will work in RAID or if it will work at all.


Here's where the hard part comes in... I have a Gigabyte DS3 LGA 775 mobo laying around along with two e6300 Conroes... They say on the FreeNAS website that any 64bit CPU should so, but most people I see on youtube use a modern CPU such as a Haswell i3.

Also, if I go with LGA775 I am limited to 8GB of RAM with this mobo. On the FreeNAS website 8GB is the minimum, but the question is, is that good enough for a home file/media server or not?

The purpose of this box will be to store my video, data, and music collection, and possibly streaming. So it doesn't have to be super powerful.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

A C2D and 8GB of RAM It is good enough. Not great, but okay. The FreeNAS crowd would probably yell at you for not using ECC ram - don't sweat it. (i3s are inexpensive, and support ECC RAM on server motherboards, so they are a tad popular.)

What is your plan to back up the data on your NAS? (Crashplan works well.)

A bunch of drives with different capacities in a traditional RAID or RAIDZ (with parity) will behave as though they are all the same (smallest common denominator) size, and you lose the capacity of one disk. This will probably result in wasted space. (1tb + 1tb + 2tb + 2tb + 3tb = 4tb.)

Since you also won't need crazy-awesome performance, I would probably suggest you look at unRAID instead of FreeNAS.

http://lime-technology.com/

It can use a bunch of drives of different capacities - it sets aside the largest one for parity information, but you get all of the capacity of all the other drives combined. (1tb + 1tb + 2tb + 2tb + 3tb = 6tb.)

Downside to unRAID is that it's slower for disk access (because of how the data is stored). But still fast enough for media streaming (that's what it's intended for, and it'll probably still be bottlenecked by your network anyway. WiFi is slow.)

Finally, if you really want a useful, general purpose home server, I would suggest dropping the pre-canned-NAS-OS schtick entirely and just installing a Linux/FreeBSD distro of your choice.

 

[Sabrewings]

I use a laptop with 1GB of RAM and an old Core 2 Duo processor as the host for my NAS4Free server. I just use it for trivial file storage and DLNA streaming to our various media sticks and it works great. I think the hardware you have listed would suffice pretty easily for FreeNAS as they're quite similar (share the same origins, actually).

Will this be your primary storage location for these files or will they be backed up elsewhere and kept there strictly for access? That's how I do our DLNA streaming and it's worked great thus far. All of the data is kept secure in my PC's RAID and the server keeps a ghost copy of everything that could be lost any time without really losing anything. Though, after running this way over a year I haven't had any data loss.

 

[mfenn]

A C2D and 8GB of RAM It is good enough. Not great, but okay. The FreeNAS crowd would probably yell at you for not using ECC ram - don't sweat it. (i3s are inexpensive, and support ECC RAM on server motherboards, so they are a tad popular.)

OP, as some additional background, the whole "ZFS requires ECC" idea is the result of one very prolific, but ultimately misinformed poster over on the FreeNAS forums. Here's a good technical writeup which explains the mistake.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

There are some pretty loud jerks over at the FreeNAS forums.

I can't knock the product, but screw them, I'mm'a use FreeBSD anyways. *pout*

 

[mvbighead]

OP, as some additional background, the whole "ZFS requires ECC" idea is the result of one very prolific, but ultimately misinformed poster over on the FreeNAS forums. Here's a good technical writeup which explains the mistake.

That's a darn good read. Thanks for providing the link!

I do have to say that the one thing about FreeNAS that irks me and has caused me to move past it entirely is its supposed requirement for 8GB of RAM. I am sure they use that RAM to provide value, but many of us simply want a low resource usage type of system that provides us quick and easy access to our disk. And as we're likely reading bits from disk directly and not something that would be happily sitting there in memory, I don't see how requiring anything more than a 1GB or 2GB should ever really be required. The OS is extremely small, and would like fit all of it's required data inside of 512MB or less.

Anyhoo, I agree with most here, just use a Linux distro an call it a day. My 'server' has an Athlon x3 3.0 (unlocked to x4) with 12GB of RAM running ESXi. My file server is a 2 cpu/2GB of RAM Ubuntu VM running on that host. I also have a separate Ubuntu VM running MythTV. And another running Cacti (why not?).

A Core2Duo's biggest downfall will likely be power consumption as it likely isn't anywhere near as power efficient as an Atom or even Haswell based CPU. It may not be far off enough to matter, but with a NAS running 24/7, most folks are concerned with enough horsepower to do the job and something that is very power efficient. A Core2Duo will definitely do the job, just may not be as power efficient, but not truly a big deal.

 

[Sabrewings]

I do have to say that the one thing about FreeNAS that irks me and has caused me to move past it entirely is its supposed requirement for 8GB of RAM. I am sure they use that RAM to provide value, but many of us simply want a low resource usage type of system that provides us quick and easy access to our disk. And as we're likely reading bits from disk directly and not something that would be happily sitting there in memory, I don't see how requiring anything more than a 1GB or 2GB should ever really be required. The OS is extremely small, and would like fit all of it's required data inside of 512MB or less.

Have you tried NAS4Free? Very low minimum requirements.

http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=documentation:setup_and_user_guide:hardware_requirements

In the laptop I mentioned earlier, I have only 1GB of memory, I run the OS off a bootable CD, I save any configs to an old 128MB USB drive, and the entire 750GB HDD is available for data storage. It's only a Core 2 Duo, but it's a mobile version so it's low power. It would probably fall on its face if I asked it to do on the fly encoding, but I just make sure all of my videos are encoded well already. MP4 H264 works on practically everything.

 

[ibex333]

A Core2Duo's biggest downfall will likely be power consumption as it likely isn't anywhere near as power efficient as an Atom or even Haswell based CPU. It may not be far off enough to matter, but with a NAS running 24/7, most folks are concerned with enough horsepower to do the job and something that is very power efficient. A Core2Duo will definitely do the job, just may not be as power efficient, but not truly a big deal.

I live in an NYC co-op apartment building where electricity is included in the maintenance. Regardless of how much power I use, I still pay the same every month.

I don't want to get involved with VM's and other Linux distros, because I don't know much about these things. While the knowledge would certainly be useful, I prefer to use the time I'd otherwise spend learning these things elsewhere at the moment. FreeNAS seemed like a good idea because it looks easy enough to set up. I will definitely look into NAS4Free and unRAID

 

[Sabrewings]

FreeNAS seemed like a good idea because it looks easy enough to set up. I will definitely look into NAS4Free and unRAID

I'm very far from a NAS4Free expert, so check out their forums. Lots of info. If you need help on setup, I can help where I can.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

That's a darn good read. Thanks for providing the link!

I do have to say that the one thing about FreeNAS that irks me and has caused me to move past it entirely is its supposed requirement for 8GB of RAM. I am sure they use that RAM to provide value, but many of us simply want a low resource usage type of system that provides us quick and easy access to our disk. And as we're likely reading bits from disk directly and not something that would be happily sitting there in memory, I don't see how requiring anything more than a 1GB or 2GB should ever really be required. The OS is extremely small, and would like fit all of it's required data inside of 512MB or less.

Anyhoo, I agree with most here, just use a Linux distro an call it a day. My 'server' has an Athlon x3 3.0 (unlocked to x4) with 12GB of RAM running ESXi. My file server is a 2 cpu/2GB of RAM Ubuntu VM running on that host. I also have a separate Ubuntu VM running MythTV. And another running Cacti (why not?).

A Core2Duo's biggest downfall will likely be power consumption as it likely isn't anywhere near as power efficient as an Atom or even Haswell based CPU. It may not be far off enough to matter, but with a NAS running 24/7, most folks are concerned with enough horsepower to do the job and something that is very power efficient. A Core2Duo will definitely do the job, just may not be as power efficient, but not truly a big deal.

Pretty much any file server, regardless of OS, will use "extra" RAM (RAM that isn't being used for anything else) as read/write cache.

Which is why the iSCSI LUN that my server (in sig) serves to my desktop (in sig) has random IO peformance characteristics about halfway in between an HD and an SSD.

 

[mvbighead]

Pretty much any file server, regardless of OS, will use "extra" RAM (RAM that isn't being used for anything else) as read/write cache.

Which is why the iSCSI LUN that my server (in sig) serves to my desktop (in sig) has random IO peformance characteristics about halfway in between an HD and an SSD.

While I can appreciate that sentiment for an iSCSI LUN, a file server holding copies of whatever random videos you present are all going to be read at a relatively low speed. I dunno, it's not as if the fileserver is going to predict what I want to watch and cache it in memory. And most drives these days have 32-64mb of cache which ought to be enough for streaming video.

Don't get me wrong, I understand your point, I just don't see a NAS box as being something that 'requires' 8GB of RAM. It wasn't that long ago that most of my systems only had 4GB of RAM, and those were multitasking browsers, word, games, etc. Randomly reading files from disk? I just don't see the need for the buffer. No matter what you're always waiting on the disk unless the files were cached in memory.

 

[mvbighead]

I live in an NYC co-op apartment building where electricity is included in the maintenance. Regardless of how much power I use, I still pay the same every month.

I don't want to get involved with VM's and other Linux distros, because I don't know much about these things. While the knowledge would certainly be useful, I prefer to use the time I'd otherwise spend learning these things elsewhere at the moment. FreeNAS seemed like a good idea because it looks easy enough to set up. I will definitely look into NAS4Free and unRAID

Both have there pluses/minuses. I will say that in my past experience, FreeNas wasn't just a turn it on an go thing any more than using Ubuntu was. And each have excellent support in forums so, at least from my perspective, using Ubuntu provided me the option to add additional software packages whereas FreeNas has certain plugins but wil be significantly more limited than Ubuntu as a platform in terms of add on packages.

Either way works well, but in the end I decided Ubuntu was a better fit for me.

 

[ultimatebob]

For some reason, the FreeNAS people think that you REALLY need 8 GB of RAM to use their product. They even used to have a nasty rant about it on their web site for the people who complained about it.

Nas4Free doesn't have that issue, but it isn't exactly easy to set up, either. The iSCSI setup was particularly painful.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

While I can appreciate that sentiment for an iSCSI LUN, a file server holding copies of whatever random videos you present are all going to be read at a relatively low speed. I dunno, it's not as if the fileserver is going to predict what I want to watch and cache it in memory. And most drives these days have 32-64mb of cache which ought to be enough for streaming video.

Don't get me wrong, I understand your point, I just don't see a NAS box as being something that 'requires' 8GB of RAM. It wasn't that long ago that most of my systems only had 4GB of RAM, and those were multitasking browsers, word, games, etc. Randomly reading files from disk? I just don't see the need for the buffer. No matter what you're always waiting on the disk unless the files were cached in memory.

I'm not saying it's needed, not by a long shot. But since OP has the RAM already, I'm just pointing out that it's not completely wasted/unused either.

 

[mvbighead]

For some reason, the FreeNAS people think that you REALLY need 8 GB of RAM to use their product. They even used to have a nasty rant about it on their web site for the people who complained about it.

Nas4Free doesn't have that issue, but it isn't exactly easy to set up, either. The iSCSI setup was particularly painful.

Yeah, that's what drove me away. Many people are just looking for a place to dump their media. Some are looking for a powerful configuration that can do all sorts of things. There's a reason why there are so many products like:

http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Mirror-2-bay-Personal-Storage/dp/B00ITI05CS

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1180#Tab2

From their snippet, some of their devices have 512mb of RAM and a 1.2GHz Dual core CPU.

I dunno, I could see a suggestion that 8+ is recommended, but requiring it when not everyone wants their NAS to be a powerhouse seems foolish.

 

[Sabrewings]

Nas4Free doesn't have that issue, but it isn't exactly easy to set up, either. The iSCSI setup was particularly painful.

I found it quite easy to setup, once I figured out the motherboard wasn't happy booting off USB and went with CD-ROM. Though, I didn't mess with iSCSI. Just set it up to use the lappie's built in HDD for storage and a small USB for config settings.

 

[cen1]

FreeNAS is being sold as a NAS solution from iXsystems as an enterprise product. When you go and ask a question on FreeNAS forums, that's the mindset those guys have. They don't want you to put FreeNAS on some shit leftover box you threw together from old parts because it's not going to be a pleasant experience. ZFS needs all the RAM it can get to compensate for reduced speeds over existing filesystems because of the all the overhead you have (checksums and whatnot). Btw, I believe 8GB is just a recommendation, not a hard requirement.

FreeNAS on 32bit is no longer supported so by that fact you are out of luck. Mixed size HDDs is also a bad start. You should check out the Linux alternatives or run 32bit FreeBSD with ZFS on top if you have enough knowledge to do that but you probably don't want that. 🙂

 

[dave_the_nerd]

FreeNAS is being sold as a NAS solution from iXsystems as an enterprise product. When you go and ask a question on FreeNAS forums, that's the mindset those guys have. They don't want you to put FreeNAS on some shit leftover box you threw together from old parts because it's not going to be a pleasant experience. ZFS needs all the RAM it can get to compensate for reduced speeds over existing filesystems because of the all the overhead you have (checksums and whatnot). Btw, I believe 8GB is just a recommendation, not a hard requirement.

FreeNAS on 32bit is no longer supported so by that fact you are out of luck. Mixed size HDDs is also a bad start. You should check out the Linux alternatives or run 32bit FreeBSD with ZFS on top if you have enough knowledge to do that but you probably don't want that. 🙂

NAS4Free is the same basic core tech, and FreeBSD has most of the same tools built in - the FreeNAS modifications are pretty impressive, but they don't fundamentally change much. If NAS4Free can do it (which it can) FreeNAS ought to be able to do it too.

Heck, FreeNAS used to be smart enough to simply say, "oh, I only have 1GB of RAM, I guess I will turn off the features that eat RAM and just use disks for disk stuff." They took that out.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your first two sentences - it's about the mindset of the FreeNAS guys, not the tech. They have the most-downloading-and-installed NAS OS, but they don't want to deal with the consumer-level folks who make that true, because they're too busy fishing for enterprise customers and consulting contracts - and ignoring their wives because they're too busy with their file system.

That last part was a bit over the line. It's fine to not like the direction of FreeNAS. It's not OK to insult the developers for no good reason.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator

 

[cen1]

Yeah, I would never go ask a noob question there, but regardless, FreeNAS is still the best thing on the market, so if you can run it I'd definitely recommend it. I made a completely new self built NAS box following all of their recommendations and couldn't be happier.

If OP had a 64bit system I think he could pull it off by mirroring same sized drives or something along those lines but raidZ really doesn't like different sized disks because you usually waste a lot of space doing it.

 

[Sabrewings]

Ah, here we go. Just to follow up, here's the CPU running my NAS4Free server. 1GB of RAM, and a 750GB HDD accompany it. Runs quite well. I've never seen CPU utilization of either core go over 20%, but I don't allow any on the fly encoding. Even my old Q6600 had trouble rendering 1080p video at near real time with Handbrake.

http://ark.intel.com/products/27253/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processor-T5500-2M-Cache-1_66-GHz-667-MHz-FSB

 

[dave_the_nerd]

but regardless, FreeNAS is still the best thing on the market,

Not really.

It's subjective, but common consensus seems to be that NAS4Free has a better (more intuitive) UI, and it's plenty fully-featured for home use. (assuming you don't just get a prebuilt NAS with Linux on it.)

unRAID makes much better use of disparately-sized hard drives and is more power efficient to boot. (Each file is stored on a single drive, idle drives can spin down.)

Vanilla FreeBSD can have all the same services/packages/tools installed, and gives you the flexibility of a full blown OS. (Mine's a hypervisor!)

And enterprise-grade NAS OSes will tend to support clustering, HA, etc., which last I checked, FreeNAS didn't. (This may have changed.)

 

[Ranulf]

Yeah, I would never go ask a noob question there, but regardless, FreeNAS is still the best thing on the market, so if you can run it I'd definitely recommend it. I made a completely new self built NAS box following all of their recommendations and couldn't be happier.

Necro... as I'm bored.

Yeah, I'll disagree with best thing on the market. Its not that noob friendly when problems crop up (intimidating forums, let alone the ECC debate). Setup wasn't too bad and everything ran well. 100-125 MB/s transfers right off the bat. I was happy. Added in a 2nd 3 drive pool and no problems there. But it apparently doesn't like being shut down for a few weeks at a time as I then couldn't get any computer on my network to access it.

The point about them being enterprise focused is correct.

 

[kirkdickinson]

Why not use NAS4Free, it takes less resources and is intended to run on machines with less resources.
http://www.nas4free.org/

I am currently building a FreeNAS box and am doing a by the book build.

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