I should first start with a pre emptive apology. I have some health problems I'm recovering from so thoughts to text is a little trickey. If I type a load of rubbish please check back in ten minutes as I'll probably have to edit each post a few times. But be warned, my terrible typing can also mask my equally terrible ideas.
So this is what I have so far. Xeon 1260l C236 motherboard and 16Gb of ECC along with a case and power supply. From what I can tell this should do the job well. I want to network this with 3 to 4 other machines and have been looking (learning) about options. I'm thinking of using the cat5 network to the router for internet access and pulling fibre to each machine for a direct connection to the server, with a single cat5 connection between the server and router.
The networking stuff I'm looking at is a Dell Qlogic QLE2460 Single Port 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI-E HBA Network Card KD414 for each machine and quad port Qlogic card for the server along with this Fiber Patch Cable. 10m, VANDESAIL® 10G Gigabit Fiber Optic Cables with LC to LC Multimode OM3 Duplex 50/125 OFNP.
Should this all play nice with freenas and windows or am I doing wrong?
Also my daughter has an Xbox one thats always got limited space. Could I setup a partition on the freenas server the xbox could format? or maybe take an image over the network/USB for a backup? This feels like a long shot/windows 10 only sort of thing. Possibly an interesting topic in itself.
I assume this is actually CPU. Would be helpful to link the MB so we know what are we working with (for example does it have 10G RJ-45) port. For me fibre channel is legacy technology. Seem everything is converging towards Ethernet. Unelss you can get an amazing deal on second hand hardare, I would not buy it personally. So with that in mind...
If you can be satisfied with 1Gbps speeds I would recommend the following:
Get a good 1G switch with a couple of 10Gbps links. Second hand Juniper or a new Netgear/Asus should do.
Wire up the FreeNAS to the 10G link with an Intel adapter. Look for second hand Intel network adapters. New they are a couple of hundred.
Wire up each client with a 1G Intel adapter (they are cheap).
Wire everything with CAT6a for easy upgrade to 10G in the future.
This should give you network throughput up to 1Gbps per client and depending on the hardware (PCI-E SSD / SSD / HDD) selection of the NAS and the configuration. Alternatively you can pick up a 10G capable pre-build NAS unit, however you would need to look at reviews. Pay close attention to the HDDs used.
If you are happy with this (and nobody comes up with a better solution) I can look around for some specific hardware.
I can get the fibre kit pretty cheaply from shop that sells clearance stock. They workout a little less than used Intel gigabit cards. For the drives I was thinking of 6x2Tb and adding maybe another 4 later on.