I want to create my own home file server. So far I’ve laid out the following. Comments, suggestions for improvement, and of criticism are welcome.
First, I went to Newegg (naturally) and pieced together a micro-server with hard drives and a RAM upgrade. Here is the public wishlist. When it’s all said and done I’ll have 12 terabytes of hard drive (note, because of the way RAID works, I won’t have 12 terabytes of usable space). To complement that I’ll have 8G of ECC RAM.
I’ve seen a lot of people on Newegg talk about how the motherboard in server will actually handle 16G of RAM if you don’t go the ECC route. I’m really curious about that. The benefit of more RAM is obvious, and the wiki’s on ZFS and RAID talk about how you can’t get enough RAM when going the route I plan on taking. What’s the benefit of sticking with ECC? Is there any concern about going the non-ECC route?
Here is an article I found that talks about the hard drives I chose.
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx
I couldn’t find any recent information about these drives from users. Everything I could find on forums just talked about how they were going to wait to see how they turned out for everyone else. Which is not helpful at all.
Next, I chose NAS4Free. Everyone, of course, has heard of FreeNAS, but NAS4Free seems more up-to-date. So I’m going to go with it instead. My plan is to run the OS on live USB image and not actually install it to one of the hard drives.
I plan on running ZFS with RAID5.
I guess it’s really that simple. Thoughts?
You mean RaidZ1 not Raid5
Apparently I do. Nice catch.
FreeNAS 8 is up to date and supported.
I use it on my P8H77-I based NAS (LGA1155 socket, 6 SATA lines) with 8GB RAM, non ECC (small factor boards with ECC support and many SATA lines are hard to come by).
If you plan to leave it running 24/7 (mine doesn’t), ECC support is better, and you should be careful about the HDDs you choose.
To that end, I found this source most useful at the time (every 6 months the return rates of various components are analyzed), this is the last one: http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-6/components-returns-rates-7.html
Thanks for the link!
I will have to disagree about FreeNAS being up-to-date though. They’re still rocking FreeBSD 8. The rest of the BSD world has moved onto 9.
Wont running it off live usb reduce performance?
The short answer is yes, but it doesn’t matter and I don’t care.
The long answer is theoretically, yes, but it’s not that simple. You have to look at this in terms of what it’s going to be doing. It’s going to be a fileserver not a gaming rig or even a PC for daily use. It will literally sit it the basement and dish out music and documents when I, or my family, need them. So any performance lost because I’m running from a live USB will go completely unnoticed.