Hey guys, newish user here! Have been lurking around for a bit.
I just have a quick question on FreeNAS (or Rockstor). I know a lot of users here are very familiar with it. I have some older hardware I have laying around and wouldn't mind repurposing it for storage needs. Hardware as follows:
I was wondering if this would be good for a simple build for ZFS. I was thinking about 4x2TB drives. You would recommend RAIDZ2 right for double parity? And am I fine with 2TB drives if just using the onboard ports since this is an older motherboard or do I need a HBA controller?
The motherboard has 6 SATAI I connectors, which means you can plug in all 4 drives plus maybe a system drive. You probably cannot saturate a SATA II interface with mechanical drives so you are fine. You don't need an HBA, people just use it when they have too many drives.
The CPU and RAM you use will affect speed, but I think you're fine with what you have. Maybe at this point the CPU and/or RAM will actually bottleneck the transfer, but you can always upgrade later. It depends on how much data you're moving.
Most of the time it will be on idle. I'm not going to be running anything like Plex on it, just simple storage. Pretty much for doing Time Machine backups of my MacBook and media storage.
for zfs you'll want to use ecc ram, which I don't know if your motherboard supports. Otherwise you can end up with issues down the road, however there are other options to zfs, albeit less secure much cheaper.