Home Server Build Help Needed

[zak riddington]

Hi All,

I'll start with explaining what i'm aiming for, then i'll try and word my my questions accordingly.

So as you can tell by the thread name im looking at building a home server, but in an ideal world id like to end up with a NAS that i can backup my media from the phones and PC's in my house which i can setup through FreeNas (the OS i will be using) which i think ill be able to do as i have watched a few "how to's" on. Another feature of my NAS i would like is that i would like to effectively run as an FTP server hosting potentially 10 clients and this is where my questions arise.

Will RAID 5 be fast enough for potentially a few clients at once reading and writing at the same time?

I'll be using ZFS file system, do i need a raid card as ive heard sometimes its better not to with this file system as individual drives can be health checked?

One of my clients is a mac user, can he write to ZFS?

What spec will i need, i.e ram cpu speed/ cores?

Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[kanewolf]

LAN is limited to about 100MB/s WAN is usually much less. Any host that has enough RAM and CPU for a FreeNAS ZFS host should be able to handle that load, independent of the protocol (FTP, NFS, SMB, etc).

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

For specs, I'd say a Pentium G3258 with ECC RAM.

 

[zak riddington]

LAN is limited to about 100MB/s WAN is usually much less. Any host that has enough RAM and CPU for a FreeNAS ZFS host should be able to handle that load, independent of the protocol (FTP, NFS, SMB, etc).

For specs, I'd say a Pentium G3258 with ECC RAM.

Thank you for the fast responses!

Can anyone help out with the other questions?

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

For the other questions:
8GB DDR3-1866 (1600 is okay) should be fine, and as far as I know OS X will write to a NAS. The filesystem on a NAS is independent as far as I know, at least I was able to access a Linux formatted NAS on Windows.

 

[popatim]

You wont need a raid card for ZFS, not is it even designed for one. It wont use it unless you put the card into HBA mode which makes it just a sata card (aka - an HBA).
The ZFS file system wont matter to your client, all they will see is the shared folders.

If you want ECC ram (used in servers so its recommended but not required) make sure the motherbd supports it.

 

[zak riddington]

For the other questions:
8GB DDR3-1866 (1600 is okay) should be fine, and as far as I know OS X will write to a NAS. The filesystem on a NAS is independent as far as I know, at least I was able to access a Linux formatted NAS on Windows.

Thank you again, this is all really useful!