FreeNAS build info
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You'll be fine without ECC RAM. Make sure you set up scrubbing and it won't be an issue. I'm currently running FreeNAS in a virtual machine with 4GB of RAM. No problems. Plex is on a different machine now, though
As always backup any personal files you might have. In my opinion media can be replaced.
Also, shameless plug, I've got lots of extra server grade parts that support ECC memory I'm trying to offload. Socket 1155 with an i3 that was my old NAS.
As always backup any personal files you might have. In my opinion media can be replaced.
Also, shameless plug, I've got lots of extra server grade parts that support ECC memory I'm trying to offload. Socket 1155 with an i3 that was my old NAS.
You can skate by with 4GB of ram in FreeNAS, but performance on small commonly accessed files will be poor, and you might run into problems when writing large files, or large groups of files to disk.
FreeNAS is built on ZFS. ZFS is a file system that uses your RAM as a cache for both read and write data. When you write to ZFS disks, it holds the entire file in memory, so that it can write it to disk in a large contiguous flush. If you don't have enough RAM available, its forced to flush the write to disk early, and that can result in fragmentation of the file.
The i5 CPU is plenty of juice if you want to run a small Plex Server plugin. My NAS runs with a AMD A10-7850k and handles 2-3 streams without problems (but the CPU fan does hit max workload for a few minutes to create a video buffer) After buffering 3 minutes of future playback, it then idles down and transcodes the video 1:1 ratio.
Realistically, you want 16-32GB of ram in FreeNAS. It will cache commonly accessed block data into RAM, so that you don't spin up the disk array. Large streaming files like multi-gig movies are not cached, and always pull from disk.
FreeNAS recommends 8GB of ram minimum.
I have scrubbing setup to scrub every 7 days.
For the Hard Drives, if they have a tool to disable head parking, use that and set it to off or infinity. The Western Digital Green drives were notorious for this, and the constant head parking causes drive failures.
For Western Digital green drives you want the WDIDLE tool (Western Digital IDLE tool).
The only thing i'd upgrade is your RAM. Bump that to 16GB and for a small server with 1 or 2 clients, it will be happy.
DDR3 is pretty cheap right now, and FreeNAS LOVES ram.
If you are going to run a Plex Server plugin, I would suggest upping the RAM. FreeNAS OS needs its own RAM. Plex Server will need its own RAM...etc.
FreeNAS is built on ZFS. ZFS is a file system that uses your RAM as a cache for both read and write data. When you write to ZFS disks, it holds the entire file in memory, so that it can write it to disk in a large contiguous flush. If you don't have enough RAM available, its forced to flush the write to disk early, and that can result in fragmentation of the file.
The i5 CPU is plenty of juice if you want to run a small Plex Server plugin. My NAS runs with a AMD A10-7850k and handles 2-3 streams without problems (but the CPU fan does hit max workload for a few minutes to create a video buffer) After buffering 3 minutes of future playback, it then idles down and transcodes the video 1:1 ratio.
Realistically, you want 16-32GB of ram in FreeNAS. It will cache commonly accessed block data into RAM, so that you don't spin up the disk array. Large streaming files like multi-gig movies are not cached, and always pull from disk.
FreeNAS recommends 8GB of ram minimum.
I have scrubbing setup to scrub every 7 days.
For the Hard Drives, if they have a tool to disable head parking, use that and set it to off or infinity. The Western Digital Green drives were notorious for this, and the constant head parking causes drive failures.
For Western Digital green drives you want the WDIDLE tool (Western Digital IDLE tool).
The only thing i'd upgrade is your RAM. Bump that to 16GB and for a small server with 1 or 2 clients, it will be happy.
DDR3 is pretty cheap right now, and FreeNAS LOVES ram.
If you are going to run a Plex Server plugin, I would suggest upping the RAM. FreeNAS OS needs its own RAM. Plex Server will need its own RAM...etc.
Green Drives that have been WDIDLE'd are fine.
My NAS has been going strong with 5x 4TB WD Green drives for the last 2.5years. 24/7 uptime, 365 days a year, only rebooting when I have patches.
You can go Red's if you like, but ZFS is extremely robust and doesn't really care about TLER, which is Red's touted feature.
400w is plenty. The drives don't use that much power. My 5 drive AMD A10-7850k NAS uses roughly 70 watts @ idle, and no more than 150 watts full load according to my UPS.
Blacks are NOWHERE near price compatible with Green drives. They are typically twice the price.
$200 - WD Black: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GWS2ZOC/?tag=tcg21-20
$145 - WD Red: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EHBERSE/?tag=tcg21-20
Greens have actually been discontinued it looks like, so they are out of the picture. I can only find old stock, and for way more money than I paid for them nearly 3 years ago.
What you already have is perfect. Don't sweat the ECC RAM. There is plenty of information out there on how ECC can help, and also tons on how 99.9% of the time it doesn't benefit from it any more than a regular file system would.
Set up weekly scrubs, smart tests and backup the important personal data. Media can be replaced, although I wouldn't want to lose it, just not cost effective to duplicate or back up.
Personally I hate the cloud for anything, especially DR or backup. I'd get two Western Digital external drives to back up to. Keep one connected and do nightly backups then Monday morning rotate them and leave one in your desk at work.
Set up weekly scrubs, smart tests and backup the important personal data. Media can be replaced, although I wouldn't want to lose it, just not cost effective to duplicate or back up.
Personally I hate the cloud for anything, especially DR or backup. I'd get two Western Digital external drives to back up to. Keep one connected and do nightly backups then Monday morning rotate them and leave one in your desk at work.
I'll still have my Mediasonic Probox with a 750GB and a 2TB in it for extra data backup. I also have a handful of 2.5 drives in external boxes offsite in case something happens.
Ill look into the ram upgrade. Right now I have 3 Seagate drives that I use and was planning for a 4th, but it looks like they are labeled as "old models" now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T3GRLY/?tag=tcg21-20
My buddy has a bigger case as well that he is donating since my mini tower doesnt have the bays for all the drives, and I would rather the extra room for cooling purposes as well.
Ill look into the ram upgrade. Right now I have 3 Seagate drives that I use and was planning for a 4th, but it looks like they are labeled as "old models" now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T3GRLY/?tag=tcg21-20
My buddy has a bigger case as well that he is donating since my mini tower doesnt have the bays for all the drives, and I would rather the extra room for cooling purposes as well.
Just taking a quick look at that model number on the Seagate drive it looks like those are drives that Backblaze (cloud backup company) found very premature failures with.
Just keep that in mind and be ready to replace if they were to die. Again, what you've got will be totally fine for what you want to do. Stand up FreeNAS, get it set up and if you are seeing 'poor' performance get more RAM.
I think you will already be way ahead of your other solutions in terms of performance.
Just keep that in mind and be ready to replace if they were to die. Again, what you've got will be totally fine for what you want to do. Stand up FreeNAS, get it set up and if you are seeing 'poor' performance get more RAM.
I think you will already be way ahead of your other solutions in terms of performance.
If you are concerned about data backup, use a RaidZ2 or RaidZ3 setup.
With Z2 or Z3 you can lose 2 to 3 drives and have a functioning array. Write performance does suffer heavily though. But how much of your work load would be write anyways.
However, I do have one tid-bit. Consider putting 3 SSD's in RaidZ1 to put your Plugin Jails on. Plex builds a database and it puts Chapter, and seek thumbnails in directories. These are very small pictures, but it makes hundreds of thousands of them. Then you add in the metadata + media posters, and I've discovered that occasionally if I seek too fast, that it can't load the images quickly enough in the browsers. Even when I'm inside my own network.
I'm probably going to put 3x 256GB SSD's in RaidZ1, and move my jails to that Zpool. This should increase the speed of the plex interface.
I have a decently large media library, and the plex database sucks up about 200GB on its own.
With Z2 or Z3 you can lose 2 to 3 drives and have a functioning array. Write performance does suffer heavily though. But how much of your work load would be write anyways.
However, I do have one tid-bit. Consider putting 3 SSD's in RaidZ1 to put your Plugin Jails on. Plex builds a database and it puts Chapter, and seek thumbnails in directories. These are very small pictures, but it makes hundreds of thousands of them. Then you add in the metadata + media posters, and I've discovered that occasionally if I seek too fast, that it can't load the images quickly enough in the browsers. Even when I'm inside my own network.
I'm probably going to put 3x 256GB SSD's in RaidZ1, and move my jails to that Zpool. This should increase the speed of the plex interface.
I have a decently large media library, and the plex database sucks up about 200GB on its own.
How much media? I have probably 6tb of TV shows 3ish of movies and than 600gb of music and i have less than 40gb of stuff in my plex database
Damn I need to step my game up. I checked I'm at 7 for TV, 2.3 for movies, and like 500gb for music
3 SSDs is more than what I plan on spending all together to finish my build.
Thirdgen know whats up, but it sounds like for what you need what you have proposed it more than idea.
Another route you could go is UnRAID. It is licensed ($70) i believe but you can add and grow with mismatched drives. So you can create one pool with all your drives and grow as needed. I believe they also have plugins and thing for Plex. If not, they basically run off KVM which is a virtualization platform. You could very easily create a dedicated Plex VM on there.
The reason I suggested the SSD array for jails is because the seek time on the SSD's is orders of magnitude faster than any platter disk array could hope to be.
An example of the lag would be if I want to pick an album that starts with a T. I load up plex, pick Music, then when I click on T, it takes a good 5-6 seconds to load up all the album art.
My Xbox One is even worse, but its likely more an Xbox one thing than a Plex thing. I select T from the navigation on the bottom and it loads up only to the most recently loaded letter. And it loads alphabetically so I often have to wait 20-30 seconds for it to load all the album art before I can select "T" to jump to that section.
Technically, a Plex Jail is easily replaceable, since it doesn't host ANY of the actual media itself. So you could probably get away with a single SSD to hold the jails. When the SSD goes boom, you lose all of your jails, but its not hard to recreate a Plex plugin, I've done it multiple times before when I screwed up a manual upgrade and borked the entire Plex jail.
You can also just run 2 SSD's in mirror as well. And you can add mirrors later on by attaching them to the pool.
Can you put the jail on a flash drive or do you need another drive? This MB only has 4 SATA connections and those are going to be dedicated to the HDDs.
Worse come to worse I have a few 2.5 drives and an external bay.
Latency on a Flash drive would be horrendous.
Are you loading the OS onto a internal HD, or booting the NAS from USB. If you aren't, I recommend USB. Its easy, fast, keeps a SATA port open. Its actually the recommended way to do it for consumer level hardware.
You create FreeNAS installer media, usually on USB, or just burning the ISO to disc. Boot from the install media, and when it asks you where to install FreeNAS, you choose the USB drive. And off it goes.
Then you just backup the Configuration to your other computer. On a fresh install you just let it grab an IP address, hit the IP address up, then upload the config and when freenas reboots its got everything.
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If its tight, you can just put your Jails on the regular array. There are ways to move them. I did it a few months ago when I moved from having the Jails on the Platters, to putting them on SSDs. The process isn't hard, though its not quite as well documented as I'd like. But I could clean those up.
The interfaces aren't bad. What is bad is usually the NAND controller chip inside the USB drive.
Might deliver a high throughput, but horrible random i/o performance.
I use the Sandisk Extreme 3.0 64GB USB thumb drives at work for imaging. They respond pretty good. Their sequential read/write are not too bad with 250 read, and 190 write MB/s.
But the random access is what trips them up bad. So, great for writing/reading huge files. Not so great for running a database off of.
They work for booting FreeNAS up though because once FreeNAS is booted, it only reads from Memory and never touches the USB except to save the config, or apply system updates. Everything else happens in RAM.
Can you put the jail on a flash drive or do you need another drive? This MB only has 4 SATA connections and those are going to be dedicated to the HDDs.
Worse come to worse I have a few 2.5 drives and an external bay.
If you need more SATA connections there are plenty of innexpensive LSI Host Bus Adapters (HBA) that can add 8 more SATA/SAS ports. LSI 9200-8i or IBM M1015 are usually pretty common for this.
The cards require an 8x PCI-E slot and Reverse Breakout cables but will allow you to add 8 more drives very easily.
DONT USE CHEAP SATA CARDS
I read about it recently when my USB drive started showing crc errors during scrubs. As long as you have a recently backed up config then you are golden. The config file is small but contains everything needed for the pools, users, password.
So unless you have an abundance of sata ports booting from USB is the way to go.
My plan was to use a USB for FreeNAS.
Right now I have a USB3 in the PCIE slot. That can easily be removed for this.
FreeNAS won't need USB3, so I wouldn't feel bad about moving the boot drive to a USB2 slot. I don't think there is a boot speed difference at all. I could time the boot USB2 vs USB3.
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