Budget 90k+ FreeNAS Build Advice

ajackson

ajackson

Disciple
I'm looking for guidance on a FreeNAS build. For starters, I need recommendation on motherboard and cabinet with 6 to 8 bays. I plan to use the Intel G4560 for the CPU, but open to better recommendations. I have been reading up about Intel Xeon, but not sure where to even start. Also, PSU and RAM recommendations too please.

I have a Synology 918+ on the way, so the new NAS will act more for backups of the Synology.

Let me know if I’m missing or overlooking something.

Thanks!
  1. What is your budget?
    • Up to 100K, but lesser the better.
  2. What is your existing hardware configuration (component name - component brand and model)
    • NA.
  3. Which hardware will you be keeping (component name - component brand and model)
    • NA.
  4. Which hardware component are you looking to buy (component name). If you have already decided on a configuration then please mention the (component brand and model) as well, this will help us in fine tuning your requirement.
    • Intel G4560.
    • Intel Xeon.
  5. Is this going to be your final configuration or you would be adding/upgrading a component in near future. If yes then please mention when and which component
    • Will be final for a while.
  6. Where will you buy this hardware? (Online/City/TE Dealer)
    • Hyderabad.
    • Online.
  7. Would you consider buying a second hand hardware from the TE market
    • Yes.
  8. What is your intended use for this PC/hardware
    • NAS and backups.
  9. Do you have any brand preference or dislike? Please name them and the reason for your preference/dislike.
    • Prefer Intel.
  10. If you will be playing games then which type of games will you be playing?
    • NA.
  11. What is your preferred monitor resolution for gaming and normal usage
    1. NA.
  2. Are you looking to overclock?
    • No.
  2. Which operating system do you intend to use with this configuration?
    • FreeNAS.
 
what is the capacity you are looking at? I mean how many TBs? since you are buying synology which has 4 bays, I am guessing that it would be a max of 40TB (4X10TB hdds). for this type of capacity you should not be spending money on xeon. I would say, go for the cheapest cpu,mobo.
 
booo said:
what is the capacity you are looking at? I mean how many TBs? since you are buying synology which has 4 bays, I am guessing that it would be a max of 40TB (4X10TB hdds). for this type of capacity you should not be spending money on xeon. I would say, go for the cheapest cpu,mobo.
Click to expand...

The Synology would be 18TB but upgraded over time to a max of 36TB with redundancy.

Coming to the Xeon, I'm looking at longevity and laying the groundwork for a 10GbE network. I'm getting wiring done with Cat7 Network Ethernet Cable for the home though my network is currently only gigabit (both router and network switch), long term I'd like to move to a 10GbE network. I'm a media professional and I work with thousands of images in RAW format and also 4K video files, so I would like to plan for the future too.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
For what you are looking at, you should (IMO) avoid Synology and build your own. Any specific reason for looking at Synology vs others?
Click to expand...

Need the Synology for the family. Using OMV currently but want to move to the Synology for ease of use and more functionality.

Long term I might stop using it, but the family will for the photographs, Blu-ray rips, music, etc.

Nothing wrong with OMV, but it is rather limited for the non-geeks at home.
 
ajackson said:
Need the Synology for the family. Using OMV currently but want to move to the Synology for ease of use and more functionality.

Long term I might stop using it, but the family will for the photographs, Blu-ray rips, music, etc.

Nothing wrong with OMV, but it is rather limited for the non-geeks at home.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok. But the cost of Synology wont be cheap. Most of the entry level ones dont allow to upgrade the NICs, so you will be stuck with GbE nics.

Secondly, I would suggest to look at unraid as well.
 
few things:
synology has 1G ports so it would be a problem in future.
try assembling a pc with hardware raid card like megaraid and use something like raid 6.
photos and video would be sequential access all the time. you dont really need high performance drives for this. Also, implementing hardware raid would improve performance a lot.
you could implement the initial setup without a switch. you could just connect both the boxes with direct link and setup rsync and forget about it.
so, the plan would be... get a really cheap pc. but, get 10G nics and a hardware raid card, good psu and a bunch of highest cap(12G?) drives. install linux/freebsd, configure firewalls and setup router dmz, setup rsync and forget everything until the space runs out.
 
Started with FreeNAS, used that for a year.. then had a couple of file corruption issues despite a USP + power backup... recovery each Time was a massive PITA ...partly because of my lack of comfort with the underlying freeBSD as against say Debian ..and partly because documentation/information on freeBSD is relatively rare compared to a regular Linux distro

That's what prompted me to move to OMV.. used that for a few years

Then shifted to xpenology that I had a good time with.. ran pretty stable for a clone of synology that cost me practically nothing to setup
Eventually shifted everything earlier this year onto a VM with a Linux Mint instance doubling up as the NAS

In hindsight, As good as the xpenology was (it is pretty much the exact same as the synology OS), I don't see why a regular linux file server would not be as transparent to the non tech end user as anything else

The only thing I probably miss about the synology/xpenology is that LAN transfer speeds used to be around 500mbps (wireless in AP proximity ) vs around 350-400 now..
Not sure if it because of VM constraints (vs dedicated) or if there are any other tweaks that would enable me to bump this up - Either way, happy with the current transfer speeds as don't need to do LAN tfrs too often
 
My choice would be FreeBSD over FreeNAS, since it is more up to date. I have 10G network setup here with Chelsio card on the FreeBSD server and a cheap Mellanox on the Linux desktop. Mellanox is pretty cheap but had issues with vlan in FreeBSD. Also tried Solarflare card in FreeBSD but it randomly booted sometimes.

FreeBSD has been running like a rock for me since few years.

Here is a speed test between the linux and FreeBSD machines:
Code: 
$ iperf3 -c 172.31.1.1
Connecting to host 172.31.1.1, port 5201
[  4] local 172.31.1.2 port 38634 connected to 172.31.1.1 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    542 KBytes    
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    786 KBytes    
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes    
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes    
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes    
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes    
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes    
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes    
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes    
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes    
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec                  receiver

iperf Done.

My recommendation would be to pick a Supermicro motherboard board. X10SL7-F seems to be good choice for NAS. But be aware that it is pretty limited with respect to PCIE slots so no fancy addon cards.

Supermicro maintains a list of qualified RAM for each motherboard. It is better to buy off that list and ECC is what you want.
 
Last edited:
superczar said:
In hindsight, As good as the xpenology was (it is pretty much the exact same as the synology OS), I don't see why a regular linux file server would not be as transparent to the non tech end user as anything else
Click to expand...

That was what I was thinking, I was going to suggest that he setup Plex with Plex Pass.
 
rajil.s said:
My choice would be FreeBSD over FreeNAS, since it is more up to date. I have 10G network setup here with Chelsio card on the FreeBSD server and a cheap Mellanox on the Linux desktop. Mellanox is pretty cheap but had issues with vlan in FreeBSD. Also tried Solarflare card in FreeBSD but it randomly booted sometimes.

FreeBSD has been running like a rock for me since few years.

Here is a speed test between the linux and FreeBSD machines:
Code: 
$ iperf3 -c 172.31.1.1
Connecting to host 172.31.1.1, port 5201
[  4] local 172.31.1.2 port 38634 connected to 172.31.1.1 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    542 KBytes   
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    786 KBytes   
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes   
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes   
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes   
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes   
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes   
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes   
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes   
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes   
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec                  receiver

iperf Done.

My recommendation would be to pick a Supermicro motherboard board. X10SL7-F seems to be good choice for NAS. But be aware that it is pretty limited with respect to PCIE slots so no fancy addon cards.

Supermicro maintains a list of qualified RAM for each motherboard. It is better to buy off that list and ECC is what you want.
Click to expand...

What limitations wrt PCIe?

I plan to get Chelsio as well, works well with Linux and BSD...
 
booo said:
few things:
synology has 1G ports so it would be a problem in future.
try assembling a pc with hardware raid card like megaraid and use something like raid 6.
photos and video would be sequential access all the time. you dont really need high performance drives for this. Also, implementing hardware raid would improve performance a lot.
you could implement the initial setup without a switch. you could just connect both the boxes with direct link and setup rsync and forget about it.
so, the plan would be... get a really cheap pc. but, get 10G nics and a hardware raid card, good psu and a bunch of highest cap(12G?) drives. install linux/freebsd, configure firewalls and setup router dmz, setup rsync and forget everything until the space runs out.
Click to expand...
Hi,

Not really a hardware or software person. That is one of the reasons for opting for Synology. Previously I had a friend who would assemble the PC after I bought the parts, but he has moved on. I can put together/assemble regular parts like hard drives, GPU, RAM, power supply, etc. but not sure I'm equipped enough to start with CPU, cooling, hardware RAID, etc. But thanks for your recommendations, I will certainly keep that in mind.
 
superczar said:
Started with FreeNAS, used that for a year.. then had a couple of file corruption issues despite a USP + power backup... recovery each Time was a massive PITA ...partly because of my lack of comfort with the underlying freeBSD as against say Debian ..and partly because documentation/information on freeBSD is relatively rare compared to a regular Linux distro

That's what prompted me to move to OMV.. used that for a few years

Then shifted to xpenology that I had a good time with.. ran pretty stable for a clone of synology that cost me practically nothing to setup
Eventually shifted everything earlier this year onto a VM with a Linux Mint instance doubling up as the NAS

In hindsight, As good as the xpenology was (it is pretty much the exact same as the synology OS), I don't see why a regular linux file server would not be as transparent to the non tech end user as anything else

The only thing I probably miss about the synology/xpenology is that LAN transfer speeds used to be around 500mbps (wireless in AP proximity ) vs around 350-400 now..
Not sure if it because of VM constraints (vs dedicated) or if there are any other tweaks that would enable me to bump this up - Either way, happy with the current transfer speeds as don't need to do LAN tfrs too often
Click to expand...

I am happy with OMV, but it is what it is and also rather limited in terms of apps for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.

I have recently set up a PJ and it is proving quite difficult for the parents and the wife to transition to the likes of BubbleUPNP and casting as the PJ does not have smart TV functionality or inbuilt apps. I need something with apps and video transcoding for the general population around the home.

Despite the cost, Synology does check all these boxes and especially the ease-of-use.

Anyways, thanks for your comments/feedback, the Synology is already a decided purchase. I'm simply looking forward to any Prime Day deals.

I am looking forward to recommendations for a FreeNAS build that will act as an additional server and backup the Synology, as well as hopefully have 10 Gb ethernet.

Thanks again.
 
rajil.s said:
My choice would be FreeBSD over FreeNAS, since it is more up to date. I have 10G network setup here with Chelsio card on the FreeBSD server and a cheap Mellanox on the Linux desktop. Mellanox is pretty cheap but had issues with vlan in FreeBSD. Also tried Solarflare card in FreeBSD but it randomly booted sometimes.

FreeBSD has been running like a rock for me since few years.

Here is a speed test between the linux and FreeBSD machines:
Code: 
$ iperf3 -c 172.31.1.1
Connecting to host 172.31.1.1, port 5201
[  4] local 172.31.1.2 port 38634 connected to 172.31.1.1 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    542 KBytes   
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0    786 KBytes   
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes   
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0    830 KBytes   
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes   
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.06 MBytes   
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes   
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.19 MBytes   
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.15 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes   
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.15 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0   1.95 MBytes   
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.89 Gbits/sec    0             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  11.5 GBytes  9.88 Gbits/sec                  receiver

iperf Done.

My recommendation would be to pick a Supermicro motherboard board. X10SL7-F seems to be good choice for NAS. But be aware that it is pretty limited with respect to PCIE slots so no fancy addon cards.

Supermicro maintains a list of qualified RAM for each motherboard. It is better to buy off that list and ECC is what you want.
Click to expand...

Hey thanks so much, but this is totally out of my depth and out of my league. I might try/attempt it if I can get the help of any local members, but otherwise so much out of my league.

Thanks![DOUBLEPOST=1530698248][/DOUBLEPOST]
vivek.krishnan said:
That was what I was thinking, I was going to suggest that he setup Plex with Plex Pass.
Click to expand...

I plan to get the Nvidia Shield along with the Synology, and will probably add the Plex Pass.
 
Why do you want to go with a pentium or a xeon processor?
i3 8100 is a kickass quadcore for this purpose. Enterprise hardware costs a lot more with not much benefit for your purpose. If its just for backup of a NAS, all you need is a nice case and a rack. Don't need 10gbps network. Even the onboard 1gbps would be fine. >.<

Spend that money in high capacity drives instead and a case that can take 8-10drives. Add over time as you need more. Rsync or something would do just fine. Setup Sync for content over various drives and you're done. All the Raid setups etc add more complications. Instead if you like buy extra hdd for redundancy.

Get online storage. You can also get backblaze unlimited personal backup for this PC for 5$.
Backup all your data that is on this PC, to the cloud too for just 5$. Dont waste time and money over creating redundant setups that are on-site rather than offsite. If you have a surge or fire or some other shit, all these will go down together in flames along with your data.

Any of this can be swapped out later or you can add network cards later when 10gbps is more mainstream. You wont find a practical wireless device that will max out 1gbps bandwidth.

-----


Ps- Im building a similar setup.
 
ajackson said:
I am happy with OMV, but it is what it is and also rather limited in terms of apps for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.

I have recently set up a PJ and it is proving quite difficult for the parents and the wife to transition to the likes of BubbleUPNP and casting as the PJ does not have smart TV functionality or inbuilt apps. I need something with apps and video transcoding for the general population around the home.

Despite the cost, Synology does check all these boxes and especially the ease-of-use.

Anyways, thanks for your comments/feedback, the Synology is already a decided purchase. I'm simply looking forward to any Prime Day deals.

I am looking forward to recommendations for a FreeNAS build that will act as an additional server and backup the Synology, as well as hopefully have 10 Gb ethernet.

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

That is where Plex shines. I see it as a one stop for all local content, plus has support for Plex cloud. Since you have already decided on the Synology, ensure you get a model which can do hardware transcoding.

Sadly, I doubt you will get 10GbE along with the models. Secondly, I doubt you will be able to saturate a 10GbE line, but it should top at 2~2.5Gbps or so if done right on both sides.

I doubt there will be any Prime deals here in India for the Synology, plus I believe they do not honour online warranties.
 
Party Monger said:
Why do you want to go with a pentium or a xeon processor?
i3 8100 is a kickass quadcore for this purpose. Enterprise hardware costs a lot more with not much benefit for your purpose. If its just for backup of a NAS, all you need is a nice case and a rack. Don't need 10gbps network. Even the onboard 1gbps would be fine. >.<

Spend that money in high capacity drives instead and a case that can take 8-10drives. Add over time as you need more. Rsync or something would do just fine. Setup Sync for content over various drives and you're done. All the Raid setups etc add more complications. Instead if you like buy extra hdd for redundancy.

Get online storage. You can also get backblaze unlimited personal backup for this PC for 5$.
Backup all your data that is on this PC, to the cloud too for just 5$. Dont waste time and money over creating redundant setups that are on-site rather than offsite. If you have a surge or fire or some other shit, all these will go down together in flames along with your data.

Any of this can be swapped out later or you can add network cards later when 10gbps is more mainstream. You wont find a practical wireless device that will max out 1gbps bandwidth.

-----


Ps- Im building a similar setup.
Click to expand...

This is more of a gathering information phase, haven't really decided on anything yet.

I will certainly keep your recommendation for the i3 in mind.

Thanks!
 
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