Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
Any major considerations for full disk encryption? (I read docs.freenas.org on this, didn't seem like anything notable.)
To buy a computer case suitable for a Network Attached Storage, you first need to consider the form factor you’re looking for. Depending on the number of drives and how long you plan to use the rig, you’ll want to consider cooling options thoroughly. As the drives are the focal point of your build, the one features you will be most concerned about are the drive bays. Form Factor Each bay has LED indicators to let you know which ones have been occupied. This is also visible from the front the chassis though a little clear window -helpful if ever you have a drive failure. Due to this reason, decide early if you want a GPU or not. A standard option may be to choose an APU, such as the AMD Ryzen 3200G, with integrated graphics. This allows you to have the best of both worlds. This case is an ITX enclosure that barely supports six 3.5″ drives. But we consider it fit for a NAS build because it manages impressive support for 11 2.5″ drive bays too. The Phenom does this without sacrificing on GPU support, as up to 320 mm GPUs will fit. While I opted for the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F, I liked that the Supermicro family of motherboards contained several bigger, badder versions of the motherboard also available for DIY NAS builders:
My other alternative is using one of the very few mid-size case that still exist with top-to-bottom 5.25" bays (like the Sharkoon T9), and install three 5-into-3 or 4-into-3 hot-swap cages in them, but that ends up being fairly expensive, even using the cheapest cage ( from Rosewill). Such compact cases with little space “behind” the PSU are a prime example of the one disadvantage modular PSUs have in such space-constrainted situations: A need for additional space for those plugs there. Over the years, I’ve tried to test throughput using a number of different methods— crudely timing large file transfers early on and in most recent years using tools likely IOMeter. Each of the different NAS builds has been unique in its own way, but I like using the throughput to compare the builds from the past to the builds of today. I started off with the results from last year’s benchmarks, but omitted the 10Gb results since the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F only contains the four Gigabit interfaces.
All I’m trying to do when I burn-in one of my NAS machines is to look for any kind of defect in the computer’s hardware or how it’s been put together. My primary concern is that once I button up the case, I’d rather not have to open it up until I’m doing some sort of upgrade. I tend to zero in on the motherboard, CPU, and RAM in how I burn-in the DIY NAS. The fact that I have redundancy amongst the hard drives makes me feel a bit cavalier about testing the hard drives. It’s a pretty clean look and the little SATA cables are so much easier to manage in both flexibility and organization. I have two primary concerns with regards to the performance of my NAS: throughput and power consumption. The throughput of the machine determines how useable it winds up being, and the power consumption typically determines how much it’s going to wind up costing me on a recurring basis. Naturally, there are untold other possible metrics that could be of interest; these are just the two that wind up of the most interest to me. Are there any benchmarks that I’ve overlooked? Please leave a comment for any metrics you’d like to see in future NAS builds. Power Consumption Altogether, it used all 4 of the CPU core to make 4 passes of the 12 different testing algorithms types supported without any reported errors. Usually, I just like to leave the memory test running for day(s) on end while I work on other things, but the free version of PassMark’s Memtest86 is sadly limited to 4 passes, which should be more than enough to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the RAM installed. I got an especially warm and fuzzy feeling, as I had to do this several times as I tried to capture it in video for the blog.
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Had I used Silverstone’s low-profile CP11 SATA cables, this job would have been a lot more friendly. I was also looking at the DS380 originally, but once I saw than it supported mini-ITX mobos only, crossed it off my list -- I want more than one PCIe slot for future expansion. This one was built in 2018, but I reused the name from a previous build. This is the 8th FreeNAS unit I have built for home. Eight systems in ten years... I made some mistakes along the way, learned some and I try to share some of those lessons learned experiences here in the forum. I have even put together some hardware just to test things out a time or two...
I execute each of my four different tests (described above) individually in IOMeter against the drive mapped above. Given what I’ve experienced of FreeNAS-11.2-U2, I’m looking forward to getting it installed and configured on my own NAS here in the very near future! Conclusion There's also a good chance that I'll be able to completely eliminate a computer from the home inventory: I'm thinking of running OS X in emulation, which will allow me to avoid replacing my current MacBook Pro with another physical Mac (I've been less and less happy with Apple's HW offerings for years, and they've now crossed my red lines).Of course, you can always buy a preconfigured NAS. But where’s the fun in that? Building a custom Network Attached Storage allows upgradability. It allows for greater flexibility in terms of hardware. And there’s the satisfaction you get from setting up a diy rig, too. It turns out that the Sandy Bridge Xeons (E5 v1) are where Intel made a big jump in efficiency. It's quite difficult to find power usage numbers for motherboards in various states, but given my expected usage patterns (NAS idle most of the time), my calculation gave the break-even time in power costs of around 6-7 years, which is a bit more than the expected lifetime of the system. Is a SSD for SLOG worthwhile? Will any vendor's SSD work (aside from reliability or read/writes per minute), or are there potential driver issues with Samsung versus Intel?
The three pools in this one system represent the three NAS systems I had before the consolidation. For a home NAS, this chassis is huge, able to hold 48 data drives and two boot drives with a couple spaces internally for non-hot-swap drives... Two key specifications to look at here is the limitation of 65mm CPU Cooler height. At this size, a standard Intel Xeon E3/ Xeon E heatsink will work fine, but it is a tight fit for any aftermarket coolers. Next, is the PSU depth specification at 100mm, this falls into the SFX PSU size. I’ve routinely built my NAS machines with around the bare minimum recommended amount of RAM, and I’ve yet to wish that I hadn’t. Last year’s NAS wound up being an exception because I wanted the machine to be able to host and power virtual machines. For this year’s NAS, I chose to buy 8GB of Crucial 2666Mhz ECC DDR4 RAM. While I’ve long advocated the use of non-ECC RAM in the building of DIY NAS machines, it made sense to use ECC since I’d already chosen to pay the premium of an enterprise-grade motherboard. Had I gone a different route with the motherboard, I would’ve been more than happy to use non-ECC RAM. Case, Power Supply, and Cables With the use of Silverstone’s SX500-G SFX PSU ( reviewed here), the installation of 5x 2.5″ HDDs wasn’t any easier.
Q & A
More often than not, the bulk of your storage will be 3.5″ hard drives spinning away. Be sure to look at hard drive specifications for NAS usage – Seagate Ironwolf and WD Reds are standard choices. Some cases on our list simply do not have space for a large GPU. If you simply must have a graphics card, maybe look at full-towers such as the Phanteks Enthoo 719 that support ludicrous numbers of drives. But then you’re moving away from Network Attached Storage and into gaming systems. Cooling Options
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