Great info... I definitely would like to be at a cheaper price point. I only have 4 2TB drives, but obviously I was trying to give myself some room for expansion. However, in the 4 years I've been running a NAS, I've never broke ~2.5TB in stored data, so maybe to save some cash I'll just stick with 4 SATA ports. I'll try to come up with a new celeron build with a smaller psu. But I'm still confused about how to choose the right motherboard w/ECC RAM support
Well everybody seems to say you can run FreeNAS on old crappy hardware and it rocks, but there's a sticky in the hardware forum over on the FreeNAS page about buying hardware, and the recommendation there is to not use any consumer-based hardware, only professional grade servers with xeon processors.
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/
Also, I'm not even sure how to verify memory is ECC besides counting the chips, but most memory has heat sinks across them now so you can't. A lot of the stuff I looked at on newegg didn't say whether or not it was ECC/parity.
Ok, how about this build:
case/psu combo - Rosewill Ultra High Gloss Finished MicroATX Computer Case with 400W ATX 2.2 12V Power Supply, Black R363-M-BK - 39.99
cpu - Intel Pentium G3220 Haswell 3.0GHz LGA 1150 54W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80646G3220 - 69.99
mobo - ECS H87H3-M(1.0) LGA 1150 Intel H87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - 78.99
memory - Crucial Ballistix 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model BLE2KIT4G3D1608DE1TX0 - 69.99
Not familiar with the motherboard manufacturer, but the specs seem pretty good -- 32gb of ram and 6 sata ports, and it has nothing but 5 stars. It does have a Realtek network chipset, so I don't know if I should buy an Intel PCI nic. Also, the case has a 400w power supply, but it's so damn cheap. It only has 5 drive bays, but I guess if it came down to it and I needed to add that 6th drive I could figure it and rig something up. Also not entirely sure about the RAM, I just picked something, but I guess I'd have to look at recommendations from the motherboard manufacturer.
So bottom total price now comes to $258.96. Quite a huge savings from my first build. Assuming I might be able to sell my ReadyNAS for around $200, I'm looking at a total cost of $60.
Or save the ReadyNAS chasis and upgrade the my drives in the custom built NAS at somepoint, then re-use my WD Red drives in the ReadyNAS as a full NAS back-up.... hmm...
And one final question about ECC RAM. 99.9% of the writing that gets done on my NAS is copying tv shows that have been downloaded by my HTPC to my NAS. In the event of a bit flip on non-ECC RAM on data that is to be written, will it really screw up the whole array, or will it only corrupt the file that's currently being written?
I switched up the memory based on the memory compatibility list for that motherboard. That team vulcan ram doesn't seem to be on the list. I've been looking at the DDR3 1600 4gb choices listed here, but they all seem to be a bit more pricey.
Post up some zpool status porn when you can. :awe:
pool: zfs_volume
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub in progress since Mon Dec 2 20:22:14 2013
21.3G scanned out of 2.99T at 209M/s, 4h7m to go
0 repaired, 0.70% done
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zfs_volume ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/545e3d37-327b-11e3-92bd-300ed50f3e11 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/54d7e178-327b-11e3-92bd-300ed50f3e11 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/5551e59d-327b-11e3-92bd-300ed50f3e11 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
Ummmm... like, seriously?
pool: Volume1
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Volume1 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/32f0d8e7-5794-11e3-afb9-002590d43e13 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/335373f7-5794-11e3-afb9-002590d43e13 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/33b7bef9-5794-11e3-afb9-002590d43e13 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/341d20eb-5794-11e3-afb9-002590d43e13 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors