Hey Friends, I have finally decided to ascend to FreeNAS Zen, and after all the great content Wendell and Logan have been producing about the subject, I getting pumped for this build. However, I am in need of some input.
I'll go through this piece be piece:
Mobo/CPU: Here is where I really need input. I have read alot of praise about the ASRock Intel Avoton C2750, and Wendell gave it a really good review. But I have also heard of troubles with the Marvell controller on-board, as well as some funky RAM issues (see RAM section). Has anyone had issues with this board transcoding high-bitrate MKV files over FreeNAS + Plex? I've seen some murmurs of Asus releasing a competitor board for this, but do others exist that may be more refined now that we are several months out?
RAM: Currently I have THIS in my cart. However I am wide open for suggestions. I would like to do 2x 8GB sticks, so I could upgrade if needed.
Drives: I have already purchased 4x 2TB WD Red Drives, as well as a Samsung 840 PRO 256 SSD. I have a myriad of other 1TB+ drives I may use in the future for expanded storage.
Case: I am going for a Node 304 on this build.
PSU: Likely going for something like the Corsair CX430M, I prefer modular so I can keep cable management clean.
Thanks dudes for reading, I value this communities feedback on this build. I'm looking at a week or two before purchasing all the parts up.
http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/search/options/ is good to find memory I believe crucial has one too but I opted for Kingston in my nas.
sounds like a decent build but i would have opted for WD Raid Edition drives, i have those in my nas thats been going for 6 years straight.
You don't need that much ram, 4gb is more than enough, and you can go with a MUUUUUUCH cheaper second hand core2duo for a freeNAS server. Even a 1.8ghz does it's job very well.
I think I might actually go up to 32 GB of ram, I will be running 8TB of space, and I want to run de-dupilcation. Also considering I'll have two concurrent high-bitrate streams.
Regarding ZFS, am I correct that I would want to buy a 5th 2TB red drive?
You want odd number so yes
The only real RAM issues I see is people getting registered (buffered) DIMMs instead of UDIMMs (unregistered/unbuffered). The ones you picked should be fine, but if they aren't on the manufacturer's tested compatibility list, you'll have to take that with a grain of salt.
The SSD will basically be useless to FreeNAS; you'd be better off putting that money toward more RAM, IMHO. For the OS you will be perfectly fine running it off a USB stick, as generally you boot once and keep it running, and seldom make any changes to the OS. If you were thinking it would be useful as a cache drive, keep in mind that RAM is way faster than an SSD, so don't think about caching until you've maxed out the RAM. RAM helps speed up ZFS a ton; SSDs not so much, maybe even not at all depending on the workload.
You do not want deduplication, seriously you do not. LZ4 compression, yes. Dedup, absolutely not. Considering for dedup you want to have ~5GB RAM for every TB of disk space, you can't put enough RAM in unless you start looking at 16GB sticks. Dedup will also be slower than not using it. Once you turn on dedup, it is on for the whole pool, and if you don't have a huge amount of RAM, your storage will grind to an agonizing halt. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide#Deduplication
If you need 8TB and have 4x2TB drives, then I would definitely suggest the fifth to take advantage of raidz1 for some redundancy. Otherwise you run the risk of a single drive failure resulting in the loss of all the data in the pool.