Correct! Dexter_Kane. The sata ports on any mobo from just before UEFI started shipping should be able to address greater than 2tb disk's you just wont be able to boot from it. So as a rough time period guess I'm going to say around late core 2 cpus to just before sandy bridge would be the grey area. beyond Sandy should be fine in that regard. Add the necessary grain of salt however, i do remember in the grey area (when ever it was) some machines could do it others could not.
WD shipped the first 3tb hdd in oct 2010. So there is the marker i guess. I pretty much recall that by that point every desktop available could run them as a secondary hdd but might not be able to boot from it.
If you are looking a seriously cheap them AMD FM* boards have 8 sata ports from the chipset. I have used a a10-5800k as a server before, on freenas samba does not seem to run quite smoothly. file copies and the like are fine but navigating the filesystem from a windows desktop is slower than you would expect. I resolved it by running real solaris instead of freenas.
Dual cpu will realistically give you nothing but higher power consumption.
socket 115* based xeon's are probably what you are looking for. To save some cash you can go with low end cpu's on those sockets, Celeron's, Pentium's and i3's all support ECC memory (check the specific CPU on intel ARK for support just to be sure). The bigger i5 and i7 do not. Socket 115* support integrated graphics, make sure your cpu has integrated graphics (again check ARK). All x86 systems require graphics of some sort in order to boot.
It is worth mentioning that the LSI card runs in IF mode normally and you flash it with a different bios to put in into IT mode. This is not a hack or something. This is a manufacture supported action.
I have 3tb drives running on my lsi 2008 card. I would not imagine it having any reason to not like 5tb drives.
Running without a LSI HBA will be fine. Plugging the drives straight into either the AMD or intel sata ports is fine. If your mainboard includes extra sata ports on it be wary. Marvel controller based ports work poorly under solaris/freebsd. The ASmedia ones have actually been solid for me. Don't bank on the extra ports think of them as the cherry on top if they do. Use the six intel ports then buy an LSI HBA.
Hopefully I gave you some answers and things to think about.
Thanks a lot for all the useful info. So I checked and the chipset in the motherboard has 6 sata ports all from the intel chip, so I should be good on that front. As for graphics the motherboard has but I also have a spare nvidia nvs295. Since the a10 had such problems. Do you think that the x3430 will be good enough?
As for the LSI card is seems like I can skip it for now at least so I am gonna keep that money for the future.
When i googled for my issues on the browsing speed of directories i could not get any corroborating evidence. However the common thread for me is that it was always AMD processors. (a10-5800 + gigabyte mobo and a athlon II 240 + gigabyte mobo/asus mobo). Everything is fine on Solaris or Linux. So its something Freenas/Freebsd on AMD related at a guess. Or it just hates me. I think you will be fine with anything intel or that front.
I will not be getting an HBA card for now, in hopes that the motherboard will simply use the onboard SATA connectors. Also I realised that the motherboard has two USB ports right on it (not on the rear) so that would be perfect for placing the USB stick that will be running FreeNAS. I wanted to ask a few questions regarding FreeNAS for anyone that knows since I am such a newbie.
So firstly does it matter what kind of flash drive I use for FreeNAS other that being 8gb? Also if I run 6 5tb drives in zfs z2, which will result in 20tb of effective storage, how much ram do I need (if we suppose that I do not use all 32GB).
Lastly a question for the experts in the field of home NAS' is there ANY software that is relatively user friendly and you would recommend over FreeNAS? Some people mentioned earlier Solaris, NAS4free etc. My main use will be for storing media files as well as having all the data from my computer. Essentially I want to leave in my computer only windows, the programs and everything that is needed. All else will be stored in the NAS and accessed all the time.
First you want to check if you can install to usb key on the current version of freenas.
Grab a couple of quality usb keys you can set them up as a mirror. Since usb keys don't have A grade flash in them you may like to opt for bigger usb keys ie 16gb or 32gb. Don't kill yourself on price on that one, it just gives you a bit more flash cells to kill. It's more likely that the key itslf will die before you cycle all the flash though. So yeah don't go overboard.
Don't worry about it if the ports are usb 2.0 or 3.0 it wont make much difference of running the OS.
Memory requirements. If you ask Oracle they will tell you 1gb RAM per 1tb HDD. However I think that is over kill for a home server. ZFS has dynamic block sizes. Every block consumes RAM so bigger block sizes are more effective in RAM. Media files will be big block sizes. However I can't say for certain that this is the case.
FreeNAS really is the easiest most powerful software you can get. It's full featured so it takes a bit to get used to the interface and it can be a bit confusing to find things in there sometimes but it works really well.
As for Solaris. I could not recommend it unless you have problems with FreeNAS. At that point i would say give OmniOS (open source solaris essentially) and install Napp-it. Napp-it is a web interface for administering your solaris storage.