[rmilyard]

Hey all,

I have been using my hacked Lenovo IX4-300d NAS running Sabnzbd, sick beard and couchpotatoe. I am pretty much overpowering this NAS. I was thinking about building a FREENAS PC/Server. However I have never used it and not sure about hardware etc. I am looking at reusing my (4) 1tb SATA3 3.5" drives from the NAS and maybe adding 1 or 2 more. This would be my system for mostly downloading my files and processing them etc. I have all my BluRay .iso file on other NAS which is fine.

I don't want to spend a huge $$$ amount but would like something nice and room to grow. My budget it around $500 without drives since I have them.

Please help me out with hardware suggestions etc. I am local to a Fry's Electronics so would most like get hardware from there. I would like to build something this weekend while I am off.

[mrreload]

ECC Ram is the biggie.
FreeNAS uses ZFS and if read up on it you will find many reasons ECC RAM is essential.
I built a FreeNAS box out of old Dell T5400, 24GB ECC RAM, 5 4TB drives.
It's rather old and is working well even with the Plex plugin installed.
CPU power is not as critical as amount of RAM. You should really check out the FreeNAS forum to get recommendations
And Oh, I have my XBMC boxes playing from the NFS shares and the shared MySQL library in a FreeNAS jail. This all works really well.

[rmilyard]

We'll I was given a Lenovo TS130 server. It has Xeon quad core with 16gb of ECC ram. I have (4) 2tb drives to use. I am looking for help setting it up with program need to run. Sabnzbd, sickbeard and Couchpotatoe.

[nickr]

This is the xbmc forum. There are plenty of online resources for sb, cp etc.

[rmilyard]

Just asking because a lot of people here use it. Trying to learn!

[nickr]

Are you still using freenas? Google found this

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?thre...ion.19043/

[sup3rlativ3]

I tried using freenas and using raidz etc but honestly wouldn't recommend it. Try Windows server essentials 2012. Build add you would with a normal pc. I recommend 8gb ddr3 ram and minimum i5 processor.

[Nnyan]

I did not have great success with Freenas for my storage servers (even though I am somewhat comfortable with Linux). In the end I ended up with OmniOS and NAPP-IT and while there is still a learning curve I was able to have it up and running in far less time then the limited success I had with Freenas. So far I have this running just fine on the HP Microserver (4*3TB disks) in what is basically a RAID6 in RAIDZ). I have this booting off a fast USB stick and a 64GB SSD for cache/logs. This has been running with no issues for months now.