I’ve been a power user at home and always stores my data in my daily 6TB hard drive but once photos/videos came in I started adding them to a 4bay legacy drobo, 2TB Seagate portable and blu ray 25GB discs. So you can safely say that my data are all over the place.
I decided to spend some $$ to have a NAS at home to store a) Photos/Videos and maybe use PLEX so that it’s easily viewable from PC, laptop, phone, ps4 etc at least when I am home b)Store project files since I am designing things here and there c) store some video whenever I do video production related project.
Of course all of the above I want the data to be organized and protected. A setup that can sustain failure even if 2 drives fail simultaneously I believe is a RAID10 so I need a motherboard with at least 4 or 6 SATA and an add-on PCI card for the rest.
I’ve been reading different setup configurations and feedback but here’s my main concern:
Say I built a FreeNAS setup and down the road I want to expand on HDD total capacity, is it easy to just hot swap the old drives with new as you would do on a drobo or synology?
In case another part of the entire setup dies, mobo or RAM and you can’t find the same part to replace it, what happens? How do you regain access to your data and is it a higher risk than having a drobo or synology?
Do I really need a dual xeon server motherboard to achieve the above? They do go up to 288GB RAM and since it’s recommended to have 1GB RAM per 1TB drive, my system can have expandability up to 288TB!!!
Last but not least I have a 1Gb switch so I don’t think I can benefit if I get a 10Gb NIC card on the FreeNAS
I hope you can help with your advice and feedback because I am really on a dilemma if I should proceed with a built or buy a synology, but also I am tight with $$ can’t spend 500$ for a diskless box.
I must have a card such as this somewhere already that I am not using which I can add and use as OS space?
Still need to find a Power Supply and a nice enclosure.
I have a 2TB drive, 1TB somewhere so for starters I can add those two maybe buy 2 more (2x 2TB) and then start adding drives slowly.
Seems that UnRaid is easier to setup but I’d like to review everyone’s feedback before next steps.
In unRaid the entire OS is loaded into RAM. So the NVMe could be used as cache, but you don’t actually need OS space. If you use parity, whatever drive you set to parity is the largest drive capacity you can use in that system, until you use a larger parity drive.
As for your build choices, it looks like it should work fine. Any particular reason you are not following the NK4.0 guide though?
X9SCL, an 1155 Xeon, Thermaltake i2 cooler, and 8GB of RAM would be a savings over what you are looking at. I’d say the idea that you need 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage is an old wives tale. There are people here running tens of terabytes on 8GB.
If you want to build cheaply, then expand, I’d start with an e3-1220(theyre 15$), and then buy an e3-1290 v2 later, which will be comparable to 2 W3565 without costing you 40$ more each for a CPU cooler(much lower TDP). Buy 1 RAM stick now, 8, hell even 16GB. Add 3 more over time.
Starting off a whole generation earlier with a dual socket isn’t going to gain you much, will force you to use higher end coolers, cost more to run over its lifetime, and generally isn’t worth it.
Sorry for the late response… actually no. I decided that it was hard for me to spend $$ and I might be able to llive with the 16TB Legacy Drobo for now until I find something really affordable. Do you have any suggestions?
