I’m gonna have a computer ready to be repurposed pretty soon for a NAS, and I’m wondering if its worth re-using it or junking it.
Base stats:
i7-3770k
2x4GB ram
MoBo has 4 SATA2 ports and 1 SATA3 ports
Would need to pick up:
Mass storage of some kind, probably pick up some Ironwolfs.
Should I bother getting some extra RAM for it, is it gonna be able to handle Plex along side it being a backup NAS. Looking to run TrueNAS on it probably, but nothing set in stone.
Ivy Bridge can only do “basic” H.264 encoding using Intel Quick Sync so while it’s not ideal you should be fine if there’s a client that needs transcoding. If possible I’d say 12Gb in total wouldn’t hurt at all especially if you’re going to use ZFS. I would also recommend that you have a look at Toshiba’s Enterprise drives as they’re usually very competitively priced and performs great. You might want to add an Intel and/or Broadcom NIC if there’s a Realtek on the motherboard for better performance/reliability. Other than that it should be more than fine, I have a G3220 box tasked with a lot more and it doesn’t have any performance issues at all (it doesn’t run Plex but it does serve media over SMB and NFS) running FreeBSD 13 but both FreeNAS/FreeNAS Scale should be fine in the regard. Not sure if FreeNAS fully supports Quick Sync out of the box and/or at all.
Would a dedicated GPU help at all for the transcoding? I may end up having an older 9xx series Nvidia card that I could put in it, but it depends on a few things.
Plex is ultimately a nice to have, the main goal of it is to provide a secondary backup to run nightly backups too, that can then upload to something offsite, that way I’ve got my 3-2-1 covered. Media/Plex would be great to take advantage of if I can, but its not a deal breaker type thing.
It might depending on if there’s a need at all for transcoding. Looking at Nvidia NVENC - Wikipedia there might be some gain although I have no idea about the state of nVidia graphics in general outside of Windows. What might possibly be interesting for such a box are the new video cards from Intel if they include hardware encoder(s) as Intel have by far the best video support outside of Windows and their hardware encoders are solid in general. It might however take a while before driver support lands…
8GB is the lower limit for TrueNAS. Works, but don’t expect caching miracles. When adding containers+VMs on top of it, 8GB is probably too low.
CPU is plenty for storage server purposes. You can go for zstd compression on your non-media datasets (assuming 1Gbit networking).
SATA ports: SATA 2 is fine for HDDs, just don’t put SATA SSDs there. 3 ports is kinda meh. With 3 HDDs, you can go RAIDZ which can be up to 36TB (3x18TB drives) of usable storage including redundancy and all integrity features. Don’t expect much caching with this very basic setup.
HDDs there are two school on what you buy for a NAS. Expensive “NAS” Drives or Enterprise drives. Both are built for 24/7 operation. Seagate Exos and Toshiba MG08/09 are the two most favored enterprise drives with <20$/TB.
I have Toshiba myself, but they are rather noisy (random write access), so don’t use them in your living room. But otherwise my drives are spinning happily for 9 months without any troubles and having great performance (for a HDD).
I bought additional backup drives for the money I saved over the NAS drives.
PLEX transcoding certainly needs CPU power (4 old cores won’t cut it) or a GPU.
TLDR: Hardware is better than most commercial NAS <1000$. 3xSATA isn’t much and you can’t expand.You may run into bottlenecks (CPU and/or memory) when running VMs/Containers
Unless you need a WebUI running FreeBSD/Linux without containers/VMs will do just fine although 4Gb extra wouldn’t hurt and there’s no need at all for a faster CPU as long as you utilize hardware encoding unless you possibly have multiple devices that requires transcoding.