Hi community. I'm not sure this is the right forum, so please redirect me if you see fit.
I've recently come across an old 2011 Dell T5500 that I would like to use as a NAS.
Requirements: - It will not hold valuable data. - It should serve up to 5 (we are 9 actually) clients streaming HD films and music - Possibly for torrenting too.
Specs: - Xeon E5502 (dual core 1,86GHz, non-hyper-threaded) - 3GB PC3-8500e ECC RAM in tripple channel - 2x160GB seagate SATA II 7200rpm HDD's (more assorted sized HDD's will come in the future, is it crucial that they be the same size in a share?)
So, my question is, will this even work with FreeNAS and ZFS? I expect to have something in the neighbourhood of 2-3TB in the end.
And yes to use the software raid that is built into the OS you will need HDs that are the same capacity to form a drive pool, the first thing to consider is that FreeNas should be stored and booted from a USB thumb drive 8-16g is fine so make sure the Dell will boot from a USB device. The next consideration is how many SATA ports the MB has 2 would be the minimum but will not allow you to have anything but a mirrored array, 3 ports would get you the first level of redundancy and 4 would give you options, you can always use a add-in SATA controller but you will want all your drives in a pool on the same controller....afaik
I run a FreeNas media server on a 2550 Atom CPU with 16g of memory, works fine streaming to multi-devices simultaneously I would think the Xeon would be more than capable but you'll need more RAM and you'll have to weigh the cost of that vs a different system altogether. FreeNas and the ZFS file system like RAM and the bigger the drive pool - data set really the more memory you will want, as long as you stay away from the de-duplication function of the file system you should be fine with 16g of RAM.
This link may help you in figuring out what you might need...
Thanks! There are 5 SATA ports on the mobo and in fact it does support RAID if I ever wanted to do that. I suppose RAID1, but I have not looked into it.
Yes ECC RAM is massively expensive, so much so that it will costs as much as a whole new system without ECC if I want to have 16gigs of RAM.
Is there another OS I can use with the current hardware, like ubuntu server with samba and just Ext4?
I don't think you need (necessarily) 16 GB of RAM for 3 TB of storage, 1-2 GB RAM per TB storage should be fine, just a little slow. More ram will make it faster, because freeNAS uses it as cache, but I don't think you're aiming for more than maybe a few hundred Mb/s.
If you have the machine already, you can try the transfer speed with the current amount of RAM and decide based on that.
You can set up a samba share on a linux distro using ext4, but remember it is not as resilient as ZFS. freeNAS should have some things put in place for handling power failure. LVM Raid is not very power-failure resistant (because I managed to break it).
Sure.......any program like XBMC or Plex that will run on a Linux server should work as a front end for your media files providing they are housed in a file hierarchy that the software can find and use something like /media/tv-shows or media/video/tv-shows....the software just needs to be pointed to the correct main folder so it can scan it and all the sub folders to work....
As to how it will handle the load of multi-clients simultaneously will be dependent on your hardware.
I do have the hardware, and you are right I should just go ahead and try out the transfer speeds, I will do this in a couple of hours when I return home. My worry is that it will work fine now, but as I introduce more drives it will suddenly stop working and I will loose data or something, so I thought I might ask here first before settling on an OS and file system structure.
No, not a UPS, the ZFS is written in such a way that a hard shutdown should not corrupt the data on the array. (Unless running it in user space, which is not a good idea.)