Need advice on my nas build

[Yaka]

Hi everyone

 

Pretty much had it with drobo support and am planning on dumping my drobo nas.

 

Need some advice on an unraid nas i am building specs are as follows

 

Mobo  asrock rack avoton c2750

Mem 4x 8gb crucial ecc ram

Seasonic  850w psu

3u Rack case with 16 bays an 4 internal bays

 

Nas use is primarly for  storing media and photos to be accsessed by 2 kodi boxes and one or 2 tablets and notebooks.

 

I know alot people use and recomend WD red drives  and thats what i have been using in my drobos but what are peoples opinon on seagates iron wolf drives? I only ask as the 10tb iron wolf drives have dropped in price a bit.

 

Also my plan is to use 2x 10tb drives as parity drives and 4x10tb drives and over time add more hdd's as i go a long. The manual makes it seem like a fairly simple process to add drives, is this the case?

 

I also have different sized ssd's 120gb, 250gb and 500gb id it ok to mix and match diffrent ssds for cache drives?

 

If end up using all the on board sata connections which pcie card would be recomrnded for use for cache and parity drives?

 

 

Thanks

 

[tdallen]

Hi -

 

The ASRock Avoton C2750 makes a nice little NAS.  32GB of RAM is way more than unRAID needs for basic NAS operations, though it will use the excess for in-memory caching.  You'd be fine running with 8GB or 16GB (or even 4GB) if you want to save some money.  Similarly a 850w PSU is overkill for 6 drives, but it depends on whether you plan to fill that case over time.  It is a very easy process to add drives in the future.

 

You can use different size SSDs in the cache pool, but if you're configured for the default RAID 1 cache pool you'll have a lot of wasted capacity.  This BTRFS space allocator may help.

 

Commonly used 8 port SATA controllers are the Dell Perc H310 or IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode (buy on eBay from server pulls) or the Supermicro AOC-SASLP or SAS2LP.

[Yaka]

Thanks for the reply, i got the mobo and mem for good price. As for the psu i may just end up the psu in the case it just depends on noise levels its from my privious gaming pc its tere if i need it. Thanks for the heads up on the cards. That btrfs link is nice and simple:)

 

What are peoples thoughts on the seagate iron wolf drives? I may just go for them as atm they cheaper than wd and hgst nas drives