FreeNAS vs Ubuntu Server

Hey guys,

I finally managed to join the forums! And that's because I have a question.

I'm planning on setting up a home server. It should work as a central hub for at least 3 computers to share files and backup data. I also want to be able to access it remotely via a VPN connection. And last but not least do I want to use it as a game server (mostly minecraft).

I've watched the latest videos on the channel and have done some research and now I'm stuck on the decision which OS to use. I mainly thought FreeNAS or Ubuntu server. One problem is that I'm using a programm that is reliant on MS SQL (which is quite the shame imho, but for now there is no way around it.) So I'm gonna need to run Windows in a VM.

This is the first time I'm building a server so I've really got no idea. Any advice would be highly appreciated!

As far as hardware goes, I've already narrowed it down to this:

i3 4150
AsRock E3C224D2I
8 or 16 GB of ECC RAM
Fractal Node 304 or CoolerMaster Elite 110
A couple WD Reds in a Raid config. We'll see about that later.
Not sure as far as the PSU goes yet.

Feel free to toss in any recommendationson on that as well!

Have a good one!

FreeNAS all the way man just make sure your not running more than 12tb of drives in it otherwise that 16gb of ram is not going to be enough.

All right man , thanks! I'm gonna try FreeNAS first. It's gonna take a while till I actually finish the build, but I will report back to you. The good thing about open source is that I can try out several options.

You could rock a Linux distro that uses BTRFS it has many of the same features of ZFS but uses much less RAM and doesn't require ECC RAM. And add Webin for running it headless.

On SQL is there any way you can use MySQL instead?

Why do people keep telling this myth? Do you really think I have 80 GB of ram for my 80 TB fileserver? It took me 3 days on a LAN with continuous uploading to even fill 16 GB of memory. after that it just swaps it.

It depends on what kind of files you have and how much use of the server is made not by how much data you have.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/s8CB99

try this mobo it can accept 128 gigs I think. 16/32(unsure) gig sticks.

Sorry for the late reply.

Unfortunately there isn't. I've searched the crap out of google but only MS SQL is suppoorted by the program :(

Which distros are running BTRFS?

just for laughs which program might that be? The only thing that might be purely MSSQL reliant that I can think of is something from Microsoft itself.

As to which distro installs with btrfs as an option I cannot tell. I only know Opensuse, Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora as an option but there might be more.

It's called JTL-WAWI. It's a free WMS programme. My parents need it because they're running a store on eBay and Amazon.

I think I'm gonna test Ubuntu first and if it works fine I'll propably stick to it. I'm just not sure on how to set up a Windows vm under freenas that can run MS SQL which is the main application for the server.

it depends on what os your file server is running freenas runs zfs and zfs is really ram hungry because of how it opperates in most cases where your not using something like zfs your correct and you can very much get by with 1gb of ram per 100tb of storage but this is not the case with freenas. my 20tb freenas server(10tb usable because of zfs z2) uses 20gb of my 32gb of ram consistently.