I currently have a Windows 8 NAS running a FX 8350 because it was cheaper by ~$50-$100 at the time. The NAS will store all my pictures, music, and movies. My documents, coding projects, etc. will be stored on a Synology or similar.
I’m trying to decide if I should build a FreeNAS box or BUTR Linux. It would be pretty expensive to convert the board (since there are no FX server boards), chip (to Intel Xeon for board), and RAM (convert to 16-32GB ECC RAM). I plan on having about 20TB of storage over time. My other main issue is I have a Canon multifunction laser printer and it only supports Windows scanner drivers. There are no Linux scanner drivers at the this time and it will not mount nor will its scanning software run under Wine. Therefore, to be able to do this change it would cost me a significant amount of money.
Is it worth the cost to swap out the whole detail? After watching Wendell’s RAID video it has me a little paranoid about bit rot but not sure if it’s worth it since he states at the end of the video that it really only applies to large data sets which are hundreds of TB in size which mine would never be (or at least not in the near future).
Thanks for the help, guys!
Not quite understanding why you are wondering about the Canon printer support for Linux, are you wanting to use the NAS as a print server? WIndows 8 isn't really a NAS you are just using as a file server, NAS is a dedicated network storage solution. Does your Canon printer have the ability to hook up to wifi or an ethernet option? If it does that would be your best bet. I wouldn't use BTRFS right now anyway because the support for raid 5 and 6 is very lacking. Using ZFS is what Wendell is refering to when he talks about running FreeNAS. Using ZFS takes quite a bit of memory 1GB per TB of storage so you have to have a pretty beefy machine if you want to have a large storage pool like you are saying you want.
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Sorry, it was late when I wrote this. Basically, I needed the box to do Plex Transcoding so I went with a beefier processor. FreeNAS forums recommended ECC RAM for the OS because errors in the memory can corrupt the pools. The problem is my motherboard currently does not support ECC RAM and the only type that do are server boards which are focused around Intel, hence why I'd have to replace the processor.
During my searching, however, I did find out that Asus makes a board that supports the AM3+ socket and ECC ram so I won't have to swap everything out.
The other main issue is I have a multifunction Canon printer/scanner. The printing can be done with Cups as Canon has a driver for Linux but it does not have scanning support for Linux. Hence, by using FreeNAS I'd have to hook up my printer to some other machine and then send over the scanned docs to the FreeNAS box. Slightly more expensive but worth it, I suppose.
Thanks for chiming in though.
All AMD boards support Registered ECC RAM, just not buffered ECC.
I just need error correction. Not sure if bufferred RAM is a component in that. Here's the board I'm thinking about getting: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A78LUSB3/
There are several types of ECC, which mix and match. You are looking for registered ECC and will be marked as EEC RDIMM
Server boards are not necessary, although you may like to know that the board mentioned supports the AM3+ Opterons (they are not needed though for ECC and you will see no benefits from using them)
So is it recommended to go with AMD for a FreeNAS build and if not, is it passable? Right now I'm looking at spending $700 for a conversion to a Xeon and SuperMicro board.
FreeNAS has no real specifications. As long as you have 8GB of RAM (for unto 8TB), you shouldn't run into any major issues. (You can run with less, but more generally gives better performance). ECC is recommended to stop corruption to the data before has reached the disks.
The same is true for the CPU, as essentially the CPU is doing the main grunt of the work for calculating the disk parity, the faster the better. If you want to do stuff like on the fly compression, again the faster the better.
It all really depends what you want to do. For instance I run FreeNAS off of an LGA 1366 supermicro board with an L5520 and 24GB RAM. Although I could easily use an 990FX board and one of the FX chips if I wanted to.
I'm going to be running about 4 1080P streams concurrently so hence why I went with the 8350. I was also thinking about getting 32GB of RAM because the entire system will be about 24TB of storage.
It's getting harder to find AMD boards with ECC memory support. That's why I was thinking about going with Intel.