Mini-atx Nas

[Doco]

Decided that I may as well post up my build - completed it on Monday past, basically I wanted a new storage medium, having 2 external hard drives was getting tedious as it was, so I had no inclination to add a third into the mix, started looking around at other areas and just became very interested in the idea of a nas, wasnt overly fussed on the price of 2-4 bay pre-built ones and so started to look into a D.I.Y. one (that and I may have just had an itch to build a pc and had no other excuse to do so lol).

After getting Freenas working on an old pc I decided to look into components for a low-powered build and I came up with :

Cpu: Intel G2030
MoBo : Asus P8H77-I
Ram : Crucial Ballistix 8gb (single stick) @1.35v
Hard Drive : Seagate 3tb Nas drive
Case : Bitfenix Prodigy
Pus : Corsair vx550 (had this spare)
O/S : Freenas (loaded on an 8gb sandisk orbit usb drive)

No real in progrees pictures (not a difficult task, screw down board, insert cpu and ram lol) but have the completed product :

wider angle

and the pretty case beside the dryer in the hall

Pretty pleased with it so far, freenas can be tricky at times but I'm getting the hang of it and nearly always seems to have very high RAM usage, so far I have installed minDlna so far but that was just to see if I could get a plugin to work, I'm looking into setting up transmission next.

Asfor the case - I like the look of it, good quality build,and I'm impressed with the th cable management, there's enough holes for you to feed most cables from one side to the other without having to go directly over the board, my fron panel connectors are all thread through the psu sectiona nd come up the other end etc.

 

[OhEsEcks]

High RAM use is down to the ZFS file system that FreeNAS uses. ZFS will use just about every bit of RAM you feed the system (keep adding RAM and it will use it). If you want to drop RAM use, use UFS.

Edit: Also, if you're interested in a Linux based alternative to FreeNAS, try Open Media Vault

 

[Doco]

I was reading up about the zfs and ram usage but was under the assumption (naively so) that 8gb would have been okay - since I read in a few places that you should have about 1gb per tb, so I was assuming 8gb with only 3tb would give me lots of head room lol, not too worried about the usage just surprised when I checked the reports the first few times.
I'l have a look at that but I cant see myself changing, just because I have 0 knowledge with linux and have atleast gotten freenas up and running, but Il look at different O/S to see whats about, Thanks.

 

[OhEsEcks]

The 1GB per TB seems to be the rule of thumb for enterprise, 8GB is usually more than enough for home use. I've read of people using 2GB and 4GB for several TBs of storage too. When I was building my own servers, I used 2x4GB sticks I had lying around just because they were there. But would have been fine with just 2 or 4GB since I wasn't doing a lot of reading from the NAS (ZFS uses so much RAM due to caching because it's faster from memory than from disc and it's why alternative pre-built NAS devices come with smaller memory amounts installed (like my 4 bay Synology with just 512MB of RAM)).

Edit: This is a good read if you want to know a bit more bite sized pieces about ZFS and memory use.