My "New" Build!

Case: Fractal Design Node 804
Motherboard: ASUS M5A78L-M PLUS/USB3
CPU: AMD Phenom II X3 720 Triple-Core 2.8 GHz Black Processor
RAM: DDR3-1600MHz PC3-12800. Two sticks are Crucial, two are generic from ebay
PSU: Rosewill 500 Watt
HDDs: 5x 3TB spinners. Various makes/models
SSD: 128 GB Samsung
OS: FreeNAS 11.2
Boot drive: Sandisk USB 3.0 32GB flash drive. Going to expand to 2 mirrored flash drive when I get a second one.



@jimbo45, what do you think for my new NAS which replaces D-Link and a StarTech 2-bay raid boxes?

Hi,
Never knew one could mount hdd's vertically thought gravity wasn't kind to them like that.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Never knew one could mount hdd's vertically thought gravity wasn't kind to them like that.

HDDs can be mounted in any orientation. Even upside down.

Does Hard Drive Orientation Affect Its Lifespan?

4 of the hard drives are in 2 pairs of mirrored drives striped so total storage is 6 TB with single drive redundancy. The 5th HDD is a "hot spare". FreeNAS will automatically replace a failing HDD with it should a failure occur. The ZFS file system is absolutely amazing! The SSD holds a Windows 10 Pro VM. The Node 804 case will hold a total of 10 3.5" hard drives, 2 2.5" drives and a slim, slot loading ODD.

I can recover from a simultaneous failure of two hard drives so long as it is 1 hard drive in each of the fore and aft banks in the case. If both hard drives in one bank simultaneously fail, then I lose my data.

Hi @DonMurray,

FreeNAS is the OS for the system. It is like a live Linux (based on FreeBSD). The OS loads from the USB flash drive into RAM and runs from there. That's why the absolute minimum RAM requirement is 8 GB, but 16 GB minimum is recommended. The configuration files for the system are saved to the same drives (called storage pools) that make up the NAS shared pools. I haven't really tested the Ethernet performance, as all my computers are WiFi. I get about 50 MB/s transfer speeds, which is enough to transfer a full length movie in about 1 minute.

FreeNAS is the host OS for the VM's. A virtual hard drive is created on the SSD (similar to a VHDX file.) I copied the Windows 10 installation ISO file to a folder on the NAS (meaning a shared storage pool). This was then assigned to a virtual DVD drive on the VM. So the first time the VM is started, it boots from the Windows 10 installation ISO file, and then you install Windows 10 to the virtual hard drive. After that, you set the VM to boot from the virtual hard drive instead of the virtual DVD drive, and you have Windows 10 up and running. The host OS, FreeNAS, uses TightVNC to connect to the VM, so you have to install TightVNC client on the computer you want to use to connect to the VM. FreeNAS also provides TightVNC web interface so you can connect to the VM from a web browser without having to install the TightVNC on the client computer.

I have had a D-Link ShareCenter and StarTech.com NAS boxes, and my FreeNAS server just blows them both away.

Hi,
Looks prime case for a borg theme