Network file storage build thing

Tappits · 17 May 2013 at 22:10

So I am totally board this weekend so am impulse building a file store because I am sick of people having to tern on my main comp just to watch toy story or something.

I currently have 7 hard drives running (2x usb 2 2x usb 3 and 3 internal) giving me about 12TB of space + my ssd with windows and another 1tb drive as a program files drive for games and programs.

Now having all this storage is grate but its a bit overkill having my overclocked gaming rig on all the time just so one one can see a film in a different room.

Now not having done anything like this before and wanting to keep my current score of every computer I have ever built has worked pretty much first time I just need to double check some things quickly before I buy everything.

This is the list of stuff.
New:
GeIL Black Dragon 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (GD316GB1333C9DC) £89.99
Corsair Builder Series CX 500W V2 '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CP-9020047-UK) £49.99
Gigabyte H61MA-D3V Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £47.99
Intel Celeron G550 2.60GHz Socket LGA 1155 Processor - Retail £37.99
NZXT Source 210 Elite Midi Tower Case £36.98
Kingston DataTraveler Micro 8GB USB 2.0 Pen Drive - (DTMCK/8GB) £5.99

New: got today found them randomly cheap in a shop so got them
2x 3TB WD greens

All ready got:
2/3x 2tb internal HDD's
2x USB 3 HDD's
2x USB 2 HDD's

I will not be using Raid as that’s not necessary if I loose a drive its only music and films its not the end of the world. (think of a bag, put everything you own in your bag, small or big.... now set fire to the bag......... you are now free)

Have I missed off anything I need or got anything totally wrong?

Still looking at the freenas things on youtube and seems doable.

Gav_881 · 18 May 2013 at 18:45

as a file server 16Gb seems far too overkill, the rest looks ok though.

Have you thought about one of the HP microservers?

Tappits · 19 May 2013 at 14:29

Gav_881 said:
as a file server 16Gb seems far too overkill, the rest looks ok though.

There’s no such thing as too much storage. Its not really 16gb I have 10.8gb (4x3tb drives) with the option to add another 5.4tb on internal drives and about 5.4tb on external usb drives if I really need if. TB's soon get used up storing Blu-ray's and stuff.

So yer on the way home from picking this stuff up from OC's shop, “they have some pretty pimp stuff on display, things that if you have to even ask how much they are you cannot afford them. I love shops like that, there an impulse buyers dream, no prices just shiny things and a slot for the mastercard to go”... you should all go there its a nice place......
Anyway on the way back I got 2 more 2tb drives from that other shop that’s like a planet but for technology stuff because there cheaper

so I would have 4 new drives for the build so I can copy everything across in one go and not have to mess about doing it in stages or anything.
I was quite amazed how large the box it all came in was considering how little I had got.

So after eating the complementary Haribo I got wit the order it was time to work building it all up.
Now I was quite surprised how nice looking this case was on the inside for a cheap £37 case.
It has 8 HDD slots which is why I got it, probably a bit large overall for what I was using it for but hay.

Was pretty easy to build up as it had hardly any parts but I was trying to keep all the wiring neat as I went along.

Motherboard built up and ready to go.

Drives unpacking

Only got 2 sata wires with the motherboard so thankfully I had some spear from other builds in the past so was able to to put it all together without buying more stuff.

Boom in

So the psu was probably a bit overkill for power but it only had 5 connectors for the hard drives leaving me with only one spear so will need to dig out some converters when I get round to fitting more drives.
I was able to re-jiggle some of my network cables about so they will reach to every bedroom in the house now and swapping my 5 port switch for the new 8 port one + moving the 5 port onto the landing in case of future expansion.

Adding the Freenas .img to the usb stick was pretty easy and after a quick tweak of the boot orders in the bios it loaded that first time. (still perfect record for building

)

Now is the slow process of moving all the files from the old drives to the new one but its only 16-20h or so to do everything then I can pull all the drives out of my main comp and stick them into storage till I need them again.

Freenas site said use 8gb ram min. now I running 16 and no raid's (which I would presume would use more to make it work?) and I am using over the past 17h 12.1gb avg.
I think the more ram you have makes it more stable or something.
CPU usage has been about 40-50% copying the files across so far and can only think it will use less to read the drives than writing to them.

Freenas was pretty easy to get working after looking at some of the guides and youtube vids.
Maybe have a look at the of the security options some time but will probably just leave it open on my home network for ease of use.

So on the hole an easy, boring and uninteresting (see boring) build topic, but I need something to do while all these files transfer across.

paintguy · 19 May 2013 at 16:21

Tappits said:
There’s no such thing as too much storage. Its not really 16gb I have 10.8gb (4x3tb drives) ...

I believe he meant the RAM

Good stuff though, but I think there are some pictures missing. Can only see 2 here.

Tappits · 19 May 2013 at 16:38

paintguy said:
I believe he meant the RAM

Good stuff though, but I think there are some pictures missing. Can only see 2 here.

Arr right yer ram... yer you do seem to need all that ram with the ZFS file systems going by how much i am using. anything to make it more stable, its not like ram costs much.

Pics should be working now.