Freenas

FreeNAS upgrade to M.2 Solid State Drive Boot Disk

nigel — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 17:32:56 +0000

FreeNAS upgrade to M.2 Solid State Drive Boot Disk nigel Mon, 01/07/2019 - 18:32

This blog shows how to upgrade the boot disk on FreeNAS to an M.2 PCIe SSD with a 2280 form factor. I went for an XPG SX6000 256GB drive although other products from different suppliers are readily available. The motivation for the upgrade was born out of necessity. When I upgraded my motherboard in November 2018 and blogged about it here /building-home-freenas-server-hardware-upgrade I bought a board with 4 SATA connections. I elected to use an old 2.5" SATA SSD I got in 2012 as my boot drive, but that used the one spare precious SATA slot after I'd plugged in my three data drives.

I noticed I was getting occasional error diagnostics reported by FreeNAS as shown in the screenshot above and repeated here: One or more devices have been removed by the administrator. Sufficient replicas exist in the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state. The message wasn't omnipresent; a reboot tended to clear it for a while but it would return.

I decided therefore that it was time to replace the pool disks, but that route was largely closed to me because I didn't have a spare SATA slot. By implementing an M.2 SSD I would free up the SATA slot and be able to replace my drives to 3x6 terabyte drives. The pool drive replacement will be covered in a separate blog.

Backup the configuration first

Before doing any work on a FreeNAS it makes eminent sense to take a configuration backup. The beauty of FreeNAS is a clean boot disk can be installed at any time and an old configuration can be restored easily. To take the backup, load up the console, and navigate to System -> General -> Save Config. Since FreeNAS uses a very neat React Bootstrap UI, there is no navigation away from the main url so I can't post a direct URL!

Also worth noting - don't save your configuration on pool data drives! I keep mine on my laptop with a copy also on a USB memory stick.

Remove existing boot drive, and create a new USB boot drive

Ok next step is to power off the FreeNAS, and remove the existing boot drive which is my ancient 2.5" SSD drive. This includes unplugging the SATA cable thus providing the sacred slot I will need for my disk capacity upgrade. Above shows my newly liberated slot. Next task is to download the boot image from FreeNAS download site, ensuring that you pick the same version of FreeNAS that is currently being used. If you aren't sure of the version, check out the config file you just saved - it's in the path name. Mine was named freenas-FreeNAS-11.1-U6 (caffd76fa)-20190630091041.tar.

Once you've downloaded the correct version (in my case 11.1-U6) to your laptop or desktop, you will need software to write the iso file to your USB stick. Since I am a Macbook user, I use Etcher, but you may have a personal favourite.

Installing the M.2 SSD card

Whilst the computer is turned off and with the covers off, install the M.2 SSD drive. Locate the slot on the motherboard; mine was situated between the full form PCIe connector and the CPU heatsink. The card slotted in easily, and the motherboard had the screw in place to hold it in position. I was pleased with this since I'd read on line that the screws are a special specification and difficult to come by.

Installation of FreeNAS

Now we've got the M.2 SSD in place, the chassis can be closed. My motherboard has smart booting so I needed no special boot order selection in my BIOS. I simply slotted in the USB stick in an external slot on the case, and powered up. The USB stick instantly became the boot drive and I then went through the following sequence as shown in the screenshots above.

1. Click Install/Upgrade

2. The possible boot locations are discovered and displayed. It came as a relief that not only my SX6000NP drive was found, it was selected by default!

3. FreeNAS is now installed and if everything has gone correctly you should see the completion message above!

At this point, reboot the machine and FreeNAS should boot correctly. It won't however contain your configuration since it doesn't know about it. Therefore in my case it'll was assigned an IP address by my DHCP server. I needed that address to point a web browser at it and load the configuration I saved earlier.

Bill of materials

M.2 Drive	ADATA ASX6000NP-128GT-C 128GB XPG SX6000 M.2 SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3x2 3D NAND R/W 730/660 MB/s - (Components > SSD Solid State Drive)	£42.98
	TOTAL	£42.98

I lucked out here - I only paid £30 since my drive had a slightly damaged box (as you can see in the first screenshot). So a nice £12 saving for zero inconvenience.

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Hardware Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Hardware Upgrade

nigel — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 12:43:04 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Hardware Upgrade nigel Wed, 07/11/2018 - 12:43

A Late 2018 Upgrade

Since I built my FreeNAS server six years ago I have come to utterly depend up it. All the media I have resides on it (I won't use the cloud!!). I can access the server from everywhere in my apartment. My Plex server uses it. My Android TV device uses it. I have a dedicated HiFi laptop that streams FLAC files to my TEAC DAC. It is absolutely crucial to my life.

My hardware was initially from 2007 although in the intervening years I did upgrade it to a new motherboard albeit that too was secondhand. The chassis was the same and the power supply was the same. It has become unreliable over the years and needs a reboot about once a week. The console messages are suggesting that power is the issue. Hardly surprising considering it is in a tower case from 2007 with minimal power.

So the decision was made to upgrade the hardware to new products. Radical! But since I depend upon it so much, it must have good hardware. My disks are still on 30% capacity so there is no urgency to upgrade those - thankfully - since a weakness of FreeNAS is it is seriously difficult to add new drives.

So let's have a look at my (sometimes strange) hardware decisions!

Motherboard

I decided upon using an 8th generation Intel chip, and wanted a socket LGA 1151 as a consequence. Ideally I was going to go for a Supermicro dedicated server motherboard. However my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered when I couldn't find a new board under £200. That quite frankly was too much for my budget. If this was a commercial machine, I would have spent the money, but since this is a hobby machine I can't really justify the expense. So I decided upon a gaming motherboard instead that was a fraction of the price. It had the prerequisite 4 SATA connections and a capacity of 32GB RAM - just what I wanted.

RAM

Whilst I wanted my motherboard to have a capacity of 32GB, I was only ready to buy 16GB this time around. I was looking for one stick, DDR4 2400MHz. The Corsair chip above came in marginally cheaper than its competitors so got the nod.

CPU

I wanted an 8th generation Coffee Lake Intel chip, and the i3 8100 is a tremendous compromise between performance and cost. It offers 3.6 GHz yet costs only just above a £100 which is fantastic value.

Chassis

Ok so mea culpa. I decided to have some fun with the chassis and I got a gaming chassis complete with multiple fans and neon lighting. It can even be used as the base of a water cooled rig! The capacity for 3.5" drives is a stupendous 10 drives however so this case should stand me in great stead for the next decade regardless of how many additional drives I need to purchase. The model is the Cooler Master Mastercase MC500M and is considered a mini tower yet weighs a ton and has an enormous footprint.

I lucked out with this case. I got it 30% cheaper than list price because it had been returned by a previous purchaser to Amazon with all the original packaging intact and totally unopened. Bargain.

Of course both this chassis and the motherboard could be repurposed as the backbone of a gaming machine at a later date if I want to go for a more orthodox server architecture.

PSU

I used an online power requirement calculator which suggested I was going to need 300-350 watts. I elected to give myself a little more headroom and went for the Corsair VS450 450W. It was a good price and quiet too.

Fans

Yes so I wanted my FreeNAS server to be the most fun serious server, and I bought three Corsair CO-9050024-WW Air Series SP140 LED 140mm fans. I am not going to add this frippery to the bill of materials below.

Boot Drive

Since I built the FreeNAS back in 2012, I've been booting it with a USB stick. This is in fact the orthodox way - the loader contains the FreeNAS system which is hosted on a bootable freebsd image. However in latter times it has become more normal to use a small SSD drive instead. The only corruptions I've had on my system have been in the loader rather than the data volumes, and of course a sticking out USB drive can easily be knocked and broken. SSDs on the other hand are considerably more durable, and of course quicker although since the drives are only used in the boot process, that isn't significant.

Thankfully I had a 64GB SSD which I bought in 2011 and had never used. It was in its original box waiting for a home theatre project to come along. Home theatre PCs are now obsolete since the advent of systems such as Kodi and Plex. Time to use my SSD!

Bill of Materials

Motherboard	GIGABYTE H310M S2H	£53.48
Chassis	Cooler Master Mastercase MC500M	£103.83
RAM	Corsair CMK16GX4M1A2400C16 DDR4 16GB 2400MHz	£118.97
CPU	Intel i3 8100 Coffee Lake	£129.95
PSU	Corsair VS450 450 W Active PFC 80 PLUS	£40.50
Fans	Corsair CO-9050024-WW Air Series SP140 LED 140mm fans x 3	n/a
Boot Drive	SanDisk SSD 64GB	£0
	TOTAL	£446.63

Of course I can't guarantee you'll get the same deals I got, but the pricing should at least be indicative.

The Build

Ok so 3 out of 10 for cable management. This was a large case and a small micro ATX motherboard, and as a consequence practically all of the cables were too short to use the correct cable management channels and features built into the case. I could have bought a bunch of extension cables - but that would have taken more time and probably extended the costs substantially.

BIOS

Once the build was complete the machine can be spun up. The first image shows rather skewed representation of the CPU temperature - the case is open, the fans are spinning and the CPU is doing nothing!

The second image shows the boot order and we can see that the first choice will be the SSD drive (actually manufactured by Hitachi and not SanDisk). The second option is actually a spare USB memory stick I used to store the screenshot. The third is the first volume in the FreeNAS RAID - but that can't be booted.

Software upgrade too!

I used the opportunity to upgrade FreeNAS from 9.10-STABLE to 11.2-STABLE during the process. This is one of the major attractions of FreeNAS - the software upgrade process is simplicity. Providing your config has been saved somewhere, you can trash your old USB FreeNAS knowing full well you just have to download the latest version of FreeNAS, install it, then import the saved config and you are good to go! Furthermore when I was moving my old drives to my new machine I didn't have to make a note of which disk goes in which SATA drive. FreeNAS sorts all this out for you.

If you are still using the cloud to save all your personal media - think again. There are so many compelling reasons the cloud is a BAD PLACE. Either buy a NAS or build a FreeNAS!

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Freenas Hardware

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Automatic CIFS SMB Connection over Wireless

nigel — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 15:18:16 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Automatic CIFS SMB Connection over Wireless nigel Sun, 26/08/2012 - 16:18

The Dolphin client connection to the FreeNAS server highlighted in my earlier tutorial at Building-a-Home-FreeNAS-Server--Configuration is good for a quick-and-dirty connection to check everything looks ok. However, there are two shortcomings with this approach. Firstly, a manual intervention is required to effect the connection and awkward parameters and syntax need remembering, and secondly files will be copied locally before being executed.

A much better approach would be to connect automatically to the FreeNAS server during my laptop's boot up process, and furthermore, connect as a properly mounted drive which will mean files such as video and audio can be streamed.

It's normal to use the /etc/fstab file to do this (won't work if you are using WiFi like I am), or the command line utility mount.cifs. The normal syntax would be of the format:
mount.cifs //{cifs share}/{cifs directory} {mount point} -o file_mode=0664,username=xxxxxx,password=xxxxxx,noperm
Note: I have included the option noperm. I found that without this only my laptop's root user had write access to the CIFS drive. By specifying noperm I am opening up the permissions to everyone on my laptop, but since this will only ever be me, there is no security implication. So, using the command in my example, it would be:

linux-ldan:/mnt # mount.cifs //192.168.0.9/personal /mnt/freenas -o file_mode=0664,username=xxxxxx,password=xxxxxx,noperm

Now we have a command that works on the command line, we need to put it in a script to automatically start when my wireless connection is started. There is a directory called if-up.d that runs scripts upon a successful network connection. Its location depends upon the Linux distribution you are using. So find it first with:

linux-ldan:~ # locate if-up.d
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/21-cifs
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/21-dhcpcd-hook-samba
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/55-samba-winbindd
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/ndp-proxy
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/SuSEfirewall2
linux-ldan:~ #

Now copy the following script. You will need to edit it to match your circumstances.
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d/99-cifs-wifi-start

#!/bin/bash
if iwconfig|grep -c xxxxxx
then
    sleep 10s
    mount.cifs //192.168.0.9/personal /mnt/freenas -o file_mode=0664,username=xxxxxx,password=xxxxxx,noperm    
fi

On the second line you need to check for the SSID of your WiFi connection, so put that value in where I have the xxxxxx. You will also have to change the mount.cifs parameters as discussed earlier. Now make sure it is executable.

linux-ldan:/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d # chmod u+x 99-cifs-wifi-start
linux-ldan:/etc/sysconfig/network/if-up.d #

Next a shutdown script is required in the network's shutdown directory.
/etc/sysconfig/network/if-down.d/99-cifs-wifi-stop

if cat /etc/mtab|grep -c /mnt/freenas
then
    umount /mnt/freenas
fi

And change the permissions.

linux-ldan:/etc/sysconfig/network/if-down.d # chmod u+x 99-cifs-wifi-stop
linux-ldan:/etc/sysconfig/network/if-down.d #

Ready to reboot and automatically connect.

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Copying Data From Linux HD

nigel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:14:04 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Copying Data From Linux HD nigel Fri, 10/08/2012 - 16:14

Once my FreeNAS server was up and running, I needed to get my existing data on to it. One possibility is copying over the LAN, but since most of my data is held on ext2 Linux had drives, it made sens to me to mount these drives in the FreeNAS server, and copy using the command line.

Here is an example on how to achieve it. I have chosen to copy the contents of a 400GB IDE HD which holds my MP3 music collection into the FreeNAS file store.

Firstly the 400GB IDE drive needs to be connected into the system. This is straightforward - just connect an IDE ribbon cable from the motherboard to the disk, and connect up a MOLEX power connector from the power supply. Once that's done, boot up the machine.

Using a remote browser pointing to the FreeNAS server, I pointed it to 192.168.0.9 which is the IP address allocated to the server by the DHCP service running on my hub. Then click on Shell in the GUI. This loads up the root shell in a dialog box. Very handy!

Firstly, I needed to determine which partition (or slice in FreeBSD parlance) my music collection resides on the disk. After a little playing around using fdisk I discovered it's /dev/ada0s1

[root@freenas /]# fdisk /dev/ada0                                               
******* Working on device /dev/ada0 *******                                     
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:                                
cylinders=486341 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)                      
 
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1                  
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:                                
cylinders=486341 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)                      
 
Media sector size is 512                                                        
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1                             
Information from DOS bootblock is:                                              
The data for partition 1 is:                                                    
sysid 131 (0x83),(Linux native)                                                 
    start 63, size 490223412 (239366 Meg), flag 0                               
        beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;                                           
        end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63                                      
The data for partition 2 is:                                                    
                                                                        
The data for partition 3 is:                                                    
                                                                        
The data for partition 4 is:                                                    
                                                                        
[root@freenas /]#

Next the partition table needs to be edited which is held in /etc/fstab

[root@freenas /]# cd /etc                                                       
[root@freenas /etc]# cat fstab                                                  
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a / ufs ro 1 1                                                
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs3 /cfg ufs rw,noauto 2 2                                       
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs4 /data ufs rw,noatime 2 2                                     
/dev/ada1p1     none                    swap            sw              0      0
/dev/ada2p1     none                    swap            sw              0      0
/dev/ada0s1     /mnt/music ext2fs ro 0 0                                        
[root@freenas /etc]#

I have added an entry here for my Linux partition which is ext2fs, and a mount point of /mnt/music which will need to be created.

[root@freenas /etc]# mkdir /mnt/music

Before an attempt is made to mount the drive, you should check it for errors. Indeed if you do not, it may not mount anyway.

[root@freenas /etc]# fsck /dev/ada0s1                                           
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)                                                    
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes   
Pass 2: Checking directory structure                                            
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity                                         
Pass 4: Checking reference counts                                               
Pass 5: Checking group summary information                                      
/dev/ada0s1: 46265/30654464 files (29.7% non-contiguous), 50023891/61277926 bloc
ks

It's now possible to mount the drive

[root@freenas /etc]# mount -t ext2fs /dev/ada0s1 /mnt/music

And now I can copy the files into my FreeNAS file system

[root@freenas /mnt/music]# cd /mnt/vol1/Music/mp3                               
[root@freenas /mnt/vol1/Music/mp3]# cp -R /mnt/music/* .

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Troubleshooting

nigel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:07:36 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Troubleshooting nigel Fri, 10/08/2012 - 16:07

The first time that I rebooted my completed FreeNAS server I was surprised to note it wouldn't boot. I got a diagnostic:

This is a FreeNAS data disk and can not boot system. System halted.

In fact this isn't a FreeNAS problem - it's a problem with the boot order of the PC which is set in the BIOS. This was a big surprise because I'd configured the BIOS to only boot from the USB memory stick. But that's not the entire story.

The system BIOS will vary depending upon the motherboard. Accessing the BIOS also varies, and on my system I repeatedly tap the del key during the start up. Select the second option Advanced BIOS Features

The next screen shows the advanced features. Select Hard Disk Boot Priority

Ensure that the USB stick is top of the list of drives. Check out the help on the right side of the screen for the mechanism of doing this.

Save this and reboot the machine and you are back in business

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Configuration

nigel — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:53:23 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Configuration nigel Thu, 09/08/2012 - 15:53

It's not my intention to duplicate all the configuration screens documented at FreeNAS, but the first thing you should do is lock down your server by setting the admin password by going to Account -> My Account -> Change Admin User

You should also set up the outgoing email facility so alerts and daily health reports can be sent to your account. go to System -> Settings -> Email and populate dependent upon your email system. I use Gmail - so if you do too, then your configuration will look like the above.

Volume Creation

Now it's time for the fun stuff. Let's create the volume. We'll be using Z-Raid for our 3x2TB drives which is the (better) equivalent of RAID5. Go to Storage -> Volumes -> Volume Manager and fill in the form as above.

Once the process has completed, which takes only a few seconds, you'll see the above. This was a little surprising! I was expecting 4TB but only got 3.6TB!! Ho-hum!

User Creation

Next task is create the user who will be accessing the data. This is a system for me and only me. It is for personal use, therefore my system is going to be simple. I created a new user in the form below at Account -> Users -> Add User. A few settings to note - I have set the home directory to the volume where my data will be held, and I have changed the permissions so ensure only me + my own personal group can access the data.

Share Creation

Big decision time. Which protocol to use? I have gone for CIFS / SAMBA since clients are available in Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Go to Sharing -> Windows (CIFS) Shares -> Add Windows (CIFS) Share.

Once the share has been created, the service needs enabling. To make this easy, the system prompts for this so click Yes

When enabled, the system returns the services screen. And that is all there is to it! Time to connect to our new share.

Linux Client Connection

To connect to the share in Linux, I use the Dolphin file manager which is installed in the KDE desktop. So load up Dolphin, right click on the breadcrumb trail, and click on the edit radio button. This opens up the breadcrumb trail so a uri can be specified manually. Use the following convention: smb://username@IP_ADDRESS/share_name. The user credentials dialog box will then be presented - use the user / password combination that was created earlier. The share will then be available.

If you look above, you can see I've connected OK and have created some folders to get me going

Windows Vista Client Connection

To connect to the share using Windows Vista, open an Explorer window and navigate to network. Windows will 'see' the FreeNAS server and by clicking 'FREENAS', the login credential dialog is displayed.

Once connected, all the folders I created with Dolphin can be seen. Note how all the system files are present too - these are there because it's the user's home directory, and they are displayed because that was set in the FreeNAS configuration. They weren't shown in the Dolphin screen grab because Dolphin's own configuration is overwriting the FreeNAS setting.

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - FreeNAS Installation

nigel — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:05:13 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - FreeNAS Installation nigel Thu, 09/08/2012 - 15:05

As mentioned previously, I decided to go for the USB memory stick installation rather than the optical drive installation. To do this, download the latest .xz image from the FreeNAS website, and use the xzcat utility piped through dd to write to the memory stick. Note: Satisfy yourself first you know the USB memory stick's device. On my system it is /dev/sdb but in most instances would be /dev/sda. Get this wrong and you could wipe your system accidentally.

linux-2jex:/ # cd /tmp
linux-2jex:/tmp # xzcat FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=64k
3231+217215 records in
3231+217215 records out
2000000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 848.691 s, 2.4 MB/s
linux-2jex:/tmp #

Be patient whilst this is writing. As you can see from my output above it took over an hour to write the 2GB!

Once the memory stick is ready, ensure your FreeNAS server's BIOS has been set to boot from a USB drive, then reboot with the stick in place. BSD loads and goes straight into the console like the image below. You must be connected to your LAN at this point, and if so your router should have assigned an IP address by its DHCP server. The assigned IP address can be clearly seen.

Now go to another computer on this network and point a browser to the IP address shown in the console output. In my case it was 192.168.0.9. All being well, your new FreeNAS will send you the following screen back.

Now's the time to correct a couple of settings before we move into the next chapter - configuration. Click on the Settings tab, and you'll see the screen below. Set the timezone and Console Keyboard Map, and of course your Language if necessary. Click Save

Click on the Advanced tab and check Show console messages in the footer - this will give you a good indication of what is going on in your box!

Cool! Now time for configuration

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Bill of Materials

nigel — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:00:52 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Bill of Materials nigel Wed, 08/08/2012 - 15:00

The objective of the exercise was to build a budget FreeNAS server with 4TB capacity to house my music collection in MP3 and FLAC format, yet costs as little as is possible by reusing hardware from previous projects. I was actually very lucky; in most instances there is additional expense, such as having to buy additional cabling, screws, or Molex to SATA connectors. In this instance I didn't have to buy anything else - I was able to source everything from the bone yards that are my many junk boxes.

Bill of Materials

Motherboard	GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2H Socket LGA775 with Intel Dual Core CPU E2200 @ 2.2GHz	£0
Chassis	Generic Tower Case	£0
Monitor	15" AOC LM520A	£0
Keyboard	Systemax 102 keys	£0
Memory	Kingston 2GB DDR2 6400 800MHz + Corsair 1GB DDR2 6400 800MHz	£0
Hard Disks	3 x Western Digital WD20EARX 6Gbit/sec SATA3	£251.67
USB Memory Stick	SanDisk Cruzer Edge 2GB	£0
	TOTAL	£251.67

Built Box

The final built box is shown below. You should be able to see that I've tidied the cabling with cable ties, and I've threaded the jumpers under the motherboard. This keeps everything neat.

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Sundry Hardware

nigel — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:49:00 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Sundry Hardware nigel Wed, 08/08/2012 - 14:49

The remaining hardware fell into place relatively easily. There were precious few decisions to be made - it was a case of what I had, I used.

Chassis: Generic Tower Case

I bought this case in 2007 at a PC shop on Streatham High Street. It was the cheapest chassis the shop had in stock - £30 - and the proprietor looked at me with contempt and disdain for selecting it. I have never worked on it without either skinning a knuckle or cutting myself on one of its many sharp, unfinished edges. At least the wounds are always clean cuts and heal easily! The case offers 5 slots of 3.5" drives and 4 for 5.25" drives (such as optical). All of the drive power plugs are of the obsolete Molex format, but over the years I've bought converters to the newer SATA format.

The side of the case where the motherboard is screwed in is offset with cable runs underneath to make it easier to keep cabling tidy. At the front of the case there are a couple of USB2 ports but Firewire is strangely missing (or maybe not considering the heritage and price).

Monitor: 15" AOC LM520A

Now here's proof that a server needs nothing more than the most rudimentary monitor. This flat-screen 15" monitor was bought from a Weybridge PC shop in 2004 for a price I cannot remember. These are fetching the princely sum of £14.50 on eBay at the moment! The resolution goes to a maximum of 1024x768px but that is more than adequate to follow the boot log in VGA!

Keyboard: Systemax 102 keys

I have no idea about the provenance of this keyboard. I do know it's very old with obviously the obsolete PS2 Keyboard connector and not the more modern USB. Believe it or not, I've worked at client sites and had to use keyboards in poorer condition than that - eeuuuwww!! Note - there is no requirement for the mouse in the picture.

Memory: DDR2

I was a little surprised by the lack of DDR memory I could rustle up - a mere 4MB. I thought I had more; perhaps I didn't look hard enough. Any rate, by sheer serendipity the 3 sticks have identical specifications. However, I don't believe it would be worthwhile to use all 4GB in the server.

Memory Decision

Use the 2GB Kingston memory + 1GB Corsair memory, keeping 1GB aside for another project.

Disk Drives: Western Digital SATA 2TB WD20EARX

Disk drives have become commodity items and it is relatively inexpensive to build a system with a decent amount of capacity. Since the intention is to RAID5 the disks together, I will be left with 4TB capacity after redundancy. For that reason I have ensured the drives are identical. They are all SATA3 specification offering 6 Gbit/s transfer. Unfortunately my motherboard doesn't support that throughput. Thankfully, the SATA specification is backwards compatible and will work ok on my SATA2 motherboard. For the application I will be using the server, I don't believe that having a SATA3 configuration throughout would justify the additional costs

Memory Stick: SanDisk Cruzer Edge 2GB

There are a number of ways of booting the BSD-based NAS server. Putting the server software on CD is a popular option, but for the best in flexibility and ability to save configuration data, a 2GB minimum USB memory stick is optimal. As it happens, I bought a 2GB SanDisk memory stick earlier in the year for transporting music from my then-girlfriend's laptop to mine. It cost £5 and since it is currently unused, it was press-ganged into this project

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Freenas

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Motherboard + CPU

nigel — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 13:42:03 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Motherboard + CPU nigel Sun, 05/08/2012 - 14:42

I have two motherboards I've used in previous projects, either of which is a likely candidate for my FreeNAS server. The reality is a brand new motherboard and CPU are totally unnecessary for a home use NAS; what I have available will more than be sufficient for my needs. So which motherboard do I use?

ASUS P5E-VM HMDI Socket LGA775 with Intel Core 2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86 GHz

I bought this particular board to be used as a Microsoft Media Center Home Theatre PC (HTPC) back in 2007. I was never totally satisfied with the system, primarily because the touch screen built into the chassis proved troublesome and eventually failed altogether, when out of warranty. Since this motherboard was used in a HTPC build, quiet running was essential and thus as you can see it was fitted with a Zelman CPU heatsink. The board itself is an enthusiasts board and built for over-clocking, although I have to admit I've always been too cautious and concerned about frying the board to attempt it.

The board specialises in supreme audio output - such as DTS - but there is no video out capability. A high specification passive card would be used in a HTPC configuration. I used the GIGABYTE GV-NX76G512P-RH. But in a server environment I'll need nothing more than something that can send a VGA signal to my small 15" monitor. So, after ferreting around in my spare parts box I uncovered this ATI 3D Rage II+ DVD card dated 1997!! I seem to recall I actually got it in the mid 2000s in a PC shop in Brixton for a fiver. The card even has an entry in the VGA Museum website!

GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2H Socket LGA775 with Intel Dual Core CPU E2200 @ 2.2GHz

I bought this board probably around the same time as the ASUS board, c2007-2008 but I have to concede I can't remember the project I had in mind which precipitated its purchase. In more recent times I have used it as a Linux SAMBA share running openSUSE. The board has a tiny microATX footprint yet is remarkably well specified considering its heritage. There is HDMI output (but also the more appropriate VGA for my needs) and support for Core 2 multi-core processors. In my case I bought an Intel Dual Core CPU running 2.2GHz.

Motherboard Decision

The two boards are capable of doing a decent job to serve up my personal files so either could be used. But the GIGABYTE board with the dual core Intel CPU is an order of magnitude faster and better equipped. Furthermore, since the board has inbuilt video, I can put my 1997 PCI ATI card to one side and use it in another project!!

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