Build Advice Small NAS build [solved]

Was planning to build a small NAS and run FreeNAS.
This is what I've come up with:

ASRock E350M1 - € 59,94
Corsair Value Select 1x4GB - € 35,99
WD Red 2TB (WD20EFRX) - € 86,99
Fractal Design Node 304 - € 63,98
Seasonic G-360 - € 57,95

And for the OS:
Kingston DataTraveler SE9 - € 6,10 (because it was the cheapest 8GB USB I could find)

As this is just an entry-level NAS I'd like to stay around €300 and have the power consumption as low as possible.

I also saw the Biostar NM70I-1037U for €10 more than the ASRock, and it seems it's a bit more powerful. Would that be a better choice?


I have no experience whatsoever with NASes, but I know some of you do, so tell me if I've forgotten something or chose something stupid.

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Also, because I can't fit 8GB ECC RAM (and a compatible CPU/mobo) in this budget I figured I'd better use UFS instead of ZFS formatting. Is this correct?

 

What about a backup for the nas?

 

Good question. While I agree that safety certainly is important, I think an external backup disk or a RAID configuration will be a later addition. I wouldn't really know what to sacrifice in this build to make room for it in my budget.
I plan on keeping the most important stuff on my own PC, the NAS, Dropbox and Skydrive anyway, so I don't think it's that urgent.

 

Just so you are aware: RAID is not a backup.

As long as your happy without to start.
Everything else looks good tbh.

 

I understand you are trying to do this on the cheap... but I think it would be wise to spend a little bit more to have something that can grow with you a lot more and have things that are more useful for a NAS build like 2x the sata ports and dual nics. Yes it is quite a bit more, but I think something like the ASRock AD2550R/U3S3 would be a nicer fit. While most source state it has max of 4GB, it's actually 4GB per channel or 8GB total.
If you don't want to spend as much, something like the GIGABYTE GA-C1037UN might be alright. It also has dual nic, supports faster 1600 memory which might be nice if you did plan to use ZFS, and as odd as it may sound the pata can be nice to have if you use an IDE DOM for the OS instead of a usb stick.

ZFS does not need ECC memory at all, but it is a good idea to follow the 1GB of ram to 1TB of disk space in the pool. You can sometimes get away with a 1 to 1.5 or something like this ratio depending. If you do want to go down that way, I would suggest starting off with 3x disks so you can set it up in raidz1. Also if you can get a good price, if there is a sale or something you might consider going to 4TB disks off the bat. It's better to have 'too much' storage than have to end up swapping disks out to larger ones in the future anyway.

I do have the little brother model of the Asrock board in your OP with the lower end E240. I hated this board and it was actually barely any better than the very old Via C7 motherboard I wanted to replace. Even for simple NAS duty it has poor performance and the network transfer and disk speeds were quite sub par to even my older Atom 330.

 

Thanks for the elaborate post and the advice. I'll look into some more expensive components and see if I can stretch my budget some more.

I do seem to remember though, that when using non-ECC RAM with ZFS, you have the risk of catastrophic failure (== losing your whole pool) if a bit flip occurs. I don't know what the chances of that are, or if its effects are exaggerated, but from reading some forum posts on the freenas forums I got the impression that ZFS+ECC was generally "the way to go". Hence why I thought UFS was my best option, even though it isn't nearly as nice as ZFS.

 

Another idea: would it be a good choice to buy an HP Microserver N54L and put in 8GB ECC RAM? I guess the CPU isn't very impressive either, but it seems to be the cheapest way to get ECC support. The price would be closer to 400, but I would be able to use ZFS completely and safely, without fear that cosmic rays might suddenly ruin everything one day. Also it has room for a whole lot of harddrives while being surprisingly small, which is a plus.
The disadvantage is of course upgradeability. I don't know if it is possible to replace the motherboard with another in the future; HP would probably rather have people buy shiny new Microservers than letting them plug in a new motherboard and done. It does seem to look more or less mITX-sized though... dremel:?)

 

(First and only) bump for visibility.

Right now I doubting between the setup in the OP, but with the GIGABYTE GA-C1037UN mobo as IvanIvanovich suggested (the ASRock AD2550R/U3S3 is unfortunately not available in any trustworthy Belgian store), or an HP Microserver N54L with added RAM. The latter is definitely the more expensive option but it is, as far as I could find, the cheapest way to get ECC compatibility. The lack of upgradeability bothers me a bit though (and modding the N54L is apparently not so easy, and I've never seen it done before).

I think it boils down to:
Option 1: Custom build - Easily upgradeable, cheaper, but no ECC within my budget (and therefore no ZFS, so also no need for 8GB RAM I think)
Option 2: N54L - Hard to upgrade, bit more expensive, but compact, fancy hot-swap features etc. and ECC (=> ZFS)
Option 3: Buy nothing - Save until budget stretches far enough to get a custom build with ECC compatibility

The last option is only problematic because my current harddrive is almost full with a ton of 'static' data that I definitely want to keep. Guess I'll have to remove the few games that are still installed...

Any opinions, experiences?

 

Just a little update:

In the end I went with something quite a bit different, with a little more power and features than I had originally planned.
Instead of a motherboard with integrated CPU I bought a Pentium G3220 and a Supermicro X10SLA-F (which happened to be on sale at 49%). This combination made ECC ram possible too, so I put in 8GB. Right now I've just finished installing FreeNAS and everything seems to run perfectly.

I did go a bit over my original budget (not much over what the Microserver would have cost me though), but I thought it would be worth it. It's also quite larger than what I had planned, but I've found a better location for the PC so its dimensions don't really matter that much any more.

Now all that's left is getting a CIFS share and OwnCloud up and running and everything's good for now. Maybe I'll try out Plex too...