Need help building a home server

Hardware Hub Networking
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OK so i have been interested in making a home server/personal cloud/NAS thingy for a while now, and i heard wendell talking about doing an updated home server video in the latest inbox and got a bit excited.

 

What i would like to be able to do is keep a backup of my desktop and a backup of my laptop on it, as well as keep a lot of storage on it (such as anime, manga, movies, music) and have it be accessible over the net to use when i'm out and about.

 

i bought a RN104 netgear NAS about a year ago to try and fulfill some of these and it has been nothing but a headache just not working and being slow.

 

 

I have got an old gaming computer that i bought pre-built a few years back where the power supply is busted but i thought i might be able to salvage some parts

specs of old computer are as follows

Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz

4GB DDR2 RAM @ 800MHz

Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR Mobo

1GB AMD Radeon HD 5750

 

I'm going to need a new mobo, new CPU, and approx 16gb of ram for 8x3TB drives in raid 1 for FreeNAS to work(if i understand it correctly)

 

 

All of this in a Define R4 which still looks and works great so at least the case could be kept the same

 

 

 

i want at least 8 drives in RAID 1 for redundancy (already got 4 WD reds so ill just buy 4 more)

would i need a raid card for that? if so, any reccomendations?

 

i hear getting an intel ethernet card is a good investment? would getting one improve my performance compared to the one built in to my mobo?

 

My router is a DIR-865L wireless AC router, is it good enough for this sort of connection or should i get a new router?

 

 

 

The software ive been looking into like FreeNAS and Plex media server as well as ownCloud seems like the services to use, any comments/recommendations on this part?

 

if anything is unclear please tell me and i'll try to clarify, if wrong section please move =)

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I'd ditch the video card from the build. If you've got onboard video, use that. FreeNAS with Plex isn't going to use it for transcoding and in my experience, it doesn't need it. Even for HD stuff.

Obviously ECC RAM is highly recommended, but without checking, I doubt your CPU or mobo support that.


FreeNAS doesn't use your traditional RAID types like RAID 1. You'd want to either use RAIDZ or RAIDZ2, depending on the kind of redundancy and performance you're after. I'd recommend doing a bit of Googling to find out which best suits.

Intel NIC's are generally pretty good, but for home use, you won't need one. If the onboard NIC is supported by FreeNAS, it'll be fine. The only potential problem is that the onboard could be a 100mbit NIC, given the age. That may be fine for you, or if you hammer the connection with a lot of data, you may notice it and then want to upgrade to a 1GBit NIC.

Plex works very well on FreeNAS and isn't very resource hungry. If I watch a movie that is of a huge file size (26gb as an example) and is very high quality 1080, the CPU doesn't work very hard at all. Quite interesting to see how little it is compared to Plex transcoding on my Windows box!


ownCloud is something that I have also been playing around with, and it seems to work very well. One of the things that you need to look out for is if you are intending on using it externally. This can be problematic if you don't have a static IP address. You may want to use a dynamic DNS service if your router supports it like DynDNS or NO-IP. You'll also need to setup port forwarding for port 80 and 443 through to your NAS.


One feature that I quite like of ownCloud is that you can select specific folders on your computer that you want to sync. Other services like Dropbox and Google Drive only allow you to have their folder, and that's all it syncs (Unless they've changed this in the past few months and I'm not aware). It's much better than having to rearrange all your data and putting it in your Dropbox folder.

Also, you don't need a RAID card at all. FreeNAS handles all of that. It was direct access to the hard drives. If you don't have enough SATA ports, you can always get a SATA card to increase your number of ports. Before you purchase something, make sure to confirm that it is compatible with FreeNAS. Alternatively, you can purchase a RAID card and flash it to what is called 'Initiator Target' mode. This pretty much means that rather than presenting a logical RAID drive or logical JBOD drives to the OS, it skips all that and just passes the drives directly to the OS, which is what you want, as FreeNAS handles all the RAID operations. A commonly used card with FreeNAS is the IBM M1015. You can pick one of these up relatively cheap from eBay. If you have 6 ports on your mobo, I'd go with a 2 port SATA card to keep cost down.

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I'm going to need a new mobo, new CPU, and approx 16gb of ram for 8x3TB drives in raid 1 for FreeNAS to work(if i understand it correctly)you can use everything you have in a freenas right now.

ECC memory only adds bitflip protection when you run it in Raidz1/2/3 so does it add security.. yes is it a lot not really.

You don't need 16 GB memory I run 80 TB with 3 pools of Raidz2 with 16 GB. It's only needed if you want extreme performance as in 10 gbit networking and things like that.

i want at least 8 drives in RAID 1 for redundancy (already got 4 WD reds so ill just buy 4 more)would i need a raid card for that? if so, any reccomendations?

No for freenas you don't need a raid card. As long as you have enough sata ports on the motherboard you are good to go. If you really need to expand IBM M1015 is a good card to get but flashing it to IT mode is recommended.

i hear getting an intel ethernet card is a good investment? would getting one improve my performance compared to the one built in to my mobo?

Depends. For home use it wouldn't add much maybe 1 MB/sec but that would be very optimistic.

My router is a DIR-865L wireless AC router, is it good enough for this sort of connection or should i get a new router?

for what? It's a gigabit switch so you get gigabit speeds just like many other routers. For home use more than enough really.

Yes you can buy premium parts and all that stuff but that is in the end just adding cherries on the cake. You can run raidz servers fine on Intel Atoms and AMD Brazos machines and reach far better speeds than most NAS devices. It's more a matter of how far do you want to take it. The current hardware you have will work fine in any Raidz setup and fill a gigabit line. You're talking internally speeds of at least 300MB/sec