FreeNAS Build - Help with RAID

[RDonk]

Hello!

So I have recently purchased all parts to my new DIY NAS build with FreeNAS except the drives. I wanted to get some opinions on the best way to set this up in order to get what I'm looking for so perhaps you guys could help.

I am looking at 4 x 2TB WD Red drives (plus maybe one extra for a hot spare).

I am planning on using this to store movies, pictures and movies (with an emphasis on movies) to stream to my WD Live Media boxes throughout the house.

As a result I think my primary concerns would be overall size and the redundancy factor - but I'm not sure if read/write speed would be a concern for the purposes of streaming?

I have very little knowledge of zfs or RAID setups but have done some reading and am really just having a hard time wrapping my head around what the best way to set these up is. Please see below for my final build - YES I know it is overkill but I'm just that kind of guy! No RAID controller but the board has 6 SATA ports on it so I'm going to be using those.

Any advice would be awesomely appreciated!!!!

Thanks


BUILD LIST - ALREADY ORDERED AND PAID FOR

ASUS P8H77-I mITX LGA1155 H77 DDR3 1PCI-E16 SATA3 DVI HDMI D-Sub USB3.0 Motherboard

Patriot Intel Extreme Masters 8GB 2X4GB PC3-12800 DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 1.5V Dual Channel Memory Kit

Intel Core i3 3225 Dual Core Hyperthreading Processor LGA1155 3.3GHZ Ivy Bridge 3MB Retail Box

Fractal Design Node 304 mITX Compact Case Black 6X3.5INT No PSU Front Audio 2XUSB3.0

Kingston DT111/8GB 8GB USB 3.0 DataTraveler 111 USB Flash Drive

Seasonic G Series 450W ATX 80PLUS Gold Modular 120mm Fan Power Supply PSU DC to DC

STILL NEEDED

4 or 5 x 2TB WD RED Drives

 

[noidea_77]

I don't see an issue with read/write speed. 4 of the disks in a raid5 array + 1 hot spare will easily fill the GBit network.

 

[hubbardt]

Looks fine to me.

I have a NAS unit I bought in 2006 and that has IDE disks and streaming is fine with that

 

[popatim]

How are you going to fit that many drives into that itx case?
I'm not sure if you can do a hot spare. sure the 4 sata 2 ports will raid together fine but you will need to check if the sata3 ports will raid with the sata 2's.

 

[FireWire2]

The parts are OVER KILL as you know it.

I would recommend playing with ZFS at first to get comfortable and understand it.
Since it is ZFS you can even use GREEN drives.

Set the BIOS as AHCI, then all the drives show up
I would not use BIOS's RAID function - it will mess up in FreeNAS
Now you can configure it as RAID5 using SW raid in FreeNAS
or create ZFS volume - lot of users love ZFS

Do some speed test - you should not care much about how fast is max trnx in sequential but rather random fashion - IO Meter is the best program to use

You will have fun give youself about 30days to play with it b4 settle for permanent solution

I use HW raid myself - but nothing wrong with ZFS with your components

 

[TechNut]

I agree that the build is a bit overkill. Check out this build I found. The case is what most interested me with the 5 internal hotswap bays.