Assembling the hardware

So last monday all my hardware arrived!
Only the RAM memory isn't the one i described in my previous post. I decided to go for the Kingston ValueRAM running at 1333 MHz.

4U  case

Case front view

All hardware together

So assembling the hardware went without too much trouble.

First, i had to temporary remove the 2 fans which are mounted at the back of the case (left on the picture): 

Once those were removed, all hardware could be placed easily in the case:

Important note, by using the Xeon E3-1230 v2, which has no integrated gpu, it seems to be impossible to use the onboard VGA output. This can be easily resolved by placing a dedicated GFX card in the pci-E slot. Since it'll become a server, there is no need to have a GFX card in it once it is fully configured.

Ofcourse, some cable management is also needed, but for now i'm way to excited about getting started with FreeNAS!

Welcome

Hi there!

So since some weeks, I was thinking about the possibilities of a NAS at home.
It would be usefull to have a central place in the network to store all data, and be able to connect to it from any kind of device (Windows computer, linux box, Android,...).

After a lot of research about ZFS (dutch: Tweakers.Net ZFS topic start ), hardware in general and FreeNAS, I ordered the following computerparts:

• Motherboard: Supermicro X9SAE-V
• CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 - 3.3 GHz
• RAM: 4x Kingstom ValueRAM DDR3 ECC 8GB 
• Powersupply: Corsair CS450M 450 Watt
• Host bus adapter: IBM ServeRAID M1015 RAID controller (this won't be used for the RAID functionality, a blogpost will be dedicated to this in the future)
• Hard Disk Drives: 7x WD Red WD40EFRX - 4TB (6 disks will be initally used to put into the NAS, 1 is spare in case a disk needs to be replaced)
• Case: Ri-vier 4U 24bay SAS/SATA storage chassis - RVS4-06A

With this configuration, I expect the NAS to have no problem storing all my data (movies, music, backups of running systems,...) and to have the data streamed around the house. It is also very important to me to have the data being stored on top of some kind of disk redundancy (ZFS).

So be sure to keep an eye on this blog, interesting things might be shown here for those of you who also want to build a NAS but don't have the 1st experience. 

I don't have any experience at all about FreeNAS or ZFS in general, but i'll try to share all my experiences (the positive as well as the negative ;-) ) out there via this blog.