I just built one recently. Motherboard-wise you should get one that supports ECC ram. Other than that it doesn't matter that much. You typically don't use the onboard SATA ports either, so the motherboard specs aren't very important. I built one recently. A bit of CPU overkill, but otherwise a pretty standard build. You can see the hardware list here:<p><a href="http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html" rel="nofollow">http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937</a><p>Lowcost home file storage,<p>HP Proliant Microserver (mine is N60L me thinkz) Can get cash back on it if you look around (sometimes 35% back)
ECC memory 8gb max (recommended if going for ZFS)
Western digital reds 3tb x 4 (reds have 3 year warrently and built for raid)
ZFS in raid 2 i think. (one disk redundancy)<p>Total space is about 7.9tb<p>Running FreeNas from a usb inside the case.<p>it works, and cost wise it was cheap minus the drives.
ZFS is great. But one thing scares me away from using it. With ZFS, you can't just simply add a new disk raidz set. You have to either build a new pool to send your data to, or :<p>1. Buy the same amount of (but larger) hard-disks
2. Replace them one by one
3. After the last disk is done, the size will grow.
4. Sell your old hard-disks.<p>Much more painful then other raid solutions.
FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and provides great platform (allowing you to use such awesome features like ZFS, BSD/Linux Jails virtualization and many others)for self made NAS appliances made out of any hardware available, but also for very solid business product (like TrueNAS), when proper hardware is used. Personally, I've switched to FreeNAS after being in love with Synology for many years.
I'm thinking about building a NAS this week. Any build recommendations, suggestions on where to start? I know people used to recommend NAS4Free over FreeNAS, is that still the case?
Has anyone successfully written a FreeNAS plugin? My experience is with Linux, not FreeBSD, and I'm struggling to figure out how to package up my server as a FreeNAS plugin.
How does this compare to NAS4Free (<a href="http://www.nas4free.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nas4free.org/</a>), the original FreeNAS?