FreeNAS Build

It's been a while since my last post (over a year). Life has taken me in several different directions since then. In February of 2015, my wife and I found out we were expecting and in October of 2015 we had a beautiful baby girl.  On the career-front, I passed my CCNP SWITCH in early March of 2016 and I have been actively working on the ROUTE test. I have been taking my time as I'm in the first year of parenthood and, as always, I want to make sure that I really learn the material; not just pursue a certification with nothing truly gained from the journey. Outside of the Cisco world, I did manage to build a much needed Network Attached Storage (FreeNAS-based). I evaluated building vs. buying and there wasn't much price difference in what was available for me to buy pre-packaged and what I could build. So I figured, why not build and learn something? 

First things, first... The BoM...

Motherboard:

Supermicro MBD-X11SSM-F-O 

• Micro-ATX 
• LGA 1151
• 64GB Max Unbufferred DDR4
• 8x SATA Ports / 6.0G
• Dual 1Gbps LAN
• Dedicated IPMI 
• 4x PCI Expansion Slots

CPU

Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5

• Skylake
• 3.4 GHz
• LGA 1151
• Quad Core / HT 

Memory

2x Samsung M39A2K43BB1-CPB

• 16GB DDR4
• Un-Buffered

Storage

2x Intel DC S3510 2.5" 80GB SSD (Boot/OS)

• 80 GB 
• Enterprise SSD

4x WD Red 3TB NAS HDD (Datastore)

• 3TB
• 5400 RPM 

Power

Cooler Master G650M-Compact PSU

• 650W
• Modular
• 80 PLUS Bronze

Case

Fractal Design Node 804 Black  (Not racked  -_-' )

• Micro-Mini ATX Compatible
• 10 potential 3.5" Disks + 2 Dedicated 2.5" Disk unit positions 
• Chambered Design 

So basically what I ended up building was a cube-style NAS powered by a Skylake Xeon with 32GB DDR4 memory and dedicated IPMI. For the last three or four years I had been toying with the notion of building or buying a NAS, and in the the event of a 'build', FreeNAS was always my number one OS choice (though i reviewed others). FreeNAS seems to offer more robust and mature features considering it's large community. 

Of course the most interesting detail about a NAS is the storage. A lot of people in the FreeNAS forums recommended using a USB for the OS(boot) drive, but I opted for two mirrored SSDs for more reliability.  On the datastore front, the most popular choice for a NAS build seems to be the Western Digital Red series drives. Not looking to build a super-high capacity storage node, I selected four 3TB WD Red NAS HDDs. Using ZFS, I configured the four disks in RAIDZ2 which requires a minimum of four disks and uses two for parity. RAIDZ2 (RAID 6) configurations can potentially withstand the loss of up to two disks according to my research. 

Check out the final product. 

This NAS build very quickly became an integral part of my lab and even my family's personal use. On the lab side, I use the NAS as a backup for my network configurations and templates and software repository. The biggest impact that the NAS has had on my labs has been its integration with my ESXi server. I use Veeam to back up all of my VMs to the NAS over SMB. I also use NFS to host my virtual machines and iso files with little to no performance difference while greatly increasing my storage flexibility.

On the personal side, myself and my wife use the NAS as backups for our computers and phones with all of our family pictures and files copied there regularly. I run both Plex and ownCloud jails from the NAS for home media server and Dropbox-like functionality, respectively. I also create images of all of our home computers using Clonezilla and store them there, having tested restoring from them successfully. 

So far I have been running my FreeNAS solution 24/7 for six months with zero issues. One of the best things I can say about FreeNAS is the all around flexibility of the system. Currently I run several file sharing protocols all from the same box including CIFS/SMB, FTP, and NFS. This flexibility makes the NAS accessible from almost any device and any OS. 

I would highly recommend FreeNAS as the OS of choice for any one looking to build a personal NAS. It's very feature-rich and FreeBSD (on which it's based) seems to be a solid, dependable operating system. The only drawback is depending on your build, FreeNAS has some recommended hardware minimums that may not be friendly to builders on a tight budget. My build is likely considered small but still totaled around $1700 to assemble. With any NAS build, the largest percentage of the cost will depend on your desired storage capacity and configuration. I built for scale (add more later) ;-) Another bit of advice that I would give to anyone looking to build a FreeNAS based storage system is to check out the FreeNAS forums. I never directly posted but I found the advice from users there extremely helpful; especially the moderator, cyberjock. FreeNAS can be one of those builds where you have to be very selective about some of the hardware being used and it would be very wise to use a starting point like the forums. 

Have a similar build or are you looking to build something similar? Feel free to comment.