AlNipper49 said:
After trying a lot of the prosumer stuff I decided to give FreeNAS another real shot. It's gotten so much freaking better from a few years ago it's not funny.
Small learning curve, extendable, stable. I probably wouldn't use it in production anywhere but for what it is it's pretty awesome.
I came thiiiiiiiiiiiis close to rescuing my beastly old Mac Pro, before going with a easier solution. Here's the final purchase:
- Qnap TS-451 4-bay enclosure > had the power supply that handled 110v-240v, which is what I needed. Plus they sell Qnaps in Korea, so I can get support
- WD Red 4.0 TB drives x 4 > the price/GB ratio for the 6TB drives are still too high. 4TB drives seem to be the sweet spot for me, especially for just a 4-bay rig
Bonus is that family was flying out from USA and had them bring the package. Since they live in NH, no sales tax, no shipping, and no tariff (shipped new would be about 12%-20% surcharge).
The Qnap was on sale for $449 (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107169), and it sells for about double that here. The drives sell fairly at the same prices but overall not a bad haul for just under $1,100.
I do lament not jumping in by going all DIY route via FreeNAS, but with the workload I could not "justify" the time I'd be spending tinkering with it.
Two additional notes on the Qnap unit:
- Only comes with 1GB of RAM, and really needs much more. Bought a 8GB kit (4GB x 2), as the general recommendation is to add a GB of RAM per GB of HD space
- I can add another 4-bay expansion unit later if need be
One final push to get the Qnap over similar units is the software, which I preferred over ones from Synology & so forth. It'll serve as our small-office backup as well as our media server, using Plex.
Speaking of, for some reason I never really got into Plex until now, and my god it's pretty awesome.