Small Cheap NAS Build Suggestions Needed

[Mordynak]

Afternoon all. I'm looking into building a FreeNAS based machine, got some ideas about what hardware I want to use, just looking for some pointers.

Intel - Pentium G4560
(Dual core with HT, few guides have suggested similar)

Gigabyte - GA-X150M-PRO ECC
Has 6 SATA 6 Gb/s, would prefer 8 to match the case its gonna go in.
Should I bother with lots of SATA 6 Gb/s connections or get a PCI card to manage it?
Either way, it's still one of the cheapest boards I've found that supports ECC.

16GB DDR4 Ram ECC Whatever

Spare Fractal R4 case.
Missus's PC is in the Fractal R4. I plan to move her old thing into a Fractal Mini C, and eventually upgrade that to something a bit beefier.
But I figured, I already have a case that can take 8 3.5" HDD trays.

Spare Seasonic G 500W PSU.

I have some 6TB WB Reds to go in it aswell.

OS will run off a SanDisk Ultra Fit 16 GB USB.

Network card??



Any suggestions?

Cheers all!

[DoubleTop]

I would go or a storage card personally - or as experience tells me, buy two of the same type and split the drives four on each.

If you put in any form of raid, you then have a form of redundancy for if the raid card dies - you can access the drives from the "other" card.

[Blue4]

@DT I'd be against any sort of RAID in the traditional sense and let ZFS deal with data duplication, any add-in card that allows the machine to directly write to the drive (sometimes referred to as JBOD) is preferred. They have a pretty good set of recommendations on the FreeNAS forums here, or in the official documentation. You'd probably be fine with the ports on the board (drivers permitting), and if not a second hand LSI card on the recommended list should do the trick.

I'd look at upgrading the USB stick to a 32GB, 16GB is a bare minimum from the way ZFS deals with swap apparently so I'd want some breathing room on it.