A few questions

[BoredSysadmin]

@zack$ Core i5-2500k does not support VT-D, so, unfortunately, no FreeNAS in a VM .
ZoL probably going to be a best overall option, but requires more expertise to maintain/upgrade (I had personal experience of upgrading ubuntu completely borked early release of ZoL, but not its much more mature now, even baked into the installer (for desktop version))
Going with FreeNAS on bare metal is another option. You still could run downloads, Plex and etc as Freenas Jails/containers or plugins with some limitations, like you won't be able to use Hardware acceleration on FreeNAS as it's underlying OS - BSD doesn't support it, at the same time I5-2500k at 4.6gh is about 10k on PassMark so it's should be able to handle at least a few videos transcodes without need for QSV or Nvidia GPU and a Plex Pass.

It is highly recommended NOT to use simple Raid5 with drives over 2TB as rebuild times are too long. with 4 drives dual parity is likely not needed, so I'd suggest raid10 or 2x VDEVs with Mirrors. 4x8TB drives should give you about 14TiB usable storage or 11TiB of practical usage (20% free space limit)

 

[Sashinka]

Thank you for that.

With this in mind, would a 2008 based HBA card suffice (Dell PERC 200i)
I can get one locally for AU$40 flashed in IT.

My set up would involve 8x 4TB Ultrastar drives if that makes a difference for Raid 5/6.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

My set up would involve 8x 4TB Ultrastar drives if that makes a difference for Raid 5/6.

You could do 1 vdev with 8x4TB drives with raidz2 (dual parity). The write performance would not be very good (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a single drive speed), but you would maximize the capacity this way.
Expanding this type of volume would be very hard as well.

Workaround this write performance issue would two options:
a) add a very fast SSD or Optane drive as ZIL cache
or
b) disable ZFS sync writes for the ZFS pool, but this is a very risky move without having UPS. What this does is writes files first to memory and then commits them to the drives later- thus async. I do this personally, but I know the risks and I have two UPS systems and a stand-up AC generator which kicks automatically in 18 seconds.

 

[Sashinka]

Thanks

Re: card. Is the Dell PERC H200i 2008 based card in line with the capabilities of the mobo/cpu limitations?

I have a 240 or 120 Sandisk Extreme SSD I could use if they are fast enough. The board has mSATA as well but never worked with them before.

Expanding this will not happen. Anything above 15TB will see me right for many years & I am sure technology will be leagues ahead by that stage.

But mainly if that card is suitable, I can at least get to testing these used enterprise drives for failures.

 

[zack$]

Your gonna have to do a bit of reading to get everything up and running. There are tons of guides on virtualization and the FreeNAS forum should help to get you acquainted with it.

As for the H220, why not search for something else that is based on sas2308?

 

[zack$]

Thanks

Re: card. Is the Dell PERC H200i 2008 based card in line with the capabilities of the mobo/cpu limitations?

I have a 240 or 120 Sandisk Extreme SSD I could use if they are fast enough. The board has mSATA as well but never worked with them before.

Expanding this will not happen. Anything above 15TB will see me right for many years & I am sure technology will be leagues ahead by that stage.

But mainly if that card is suitable, I can at least get to testing these used enterprise drives for failures.

You MB supports pcie 3.0 but your CPU only pcie 2.0; you will only be able to run at 2.0. The sas2308 cards are 3.0 parts while the sas2008 cards are 2.0 parts. Your system will therefore not be able to benefit fully from the sas2308 part.

Like I said earlier, a sas2008 based card will do the trick for you. However, if you end up running esxi 7.0 in the future, you will find that sas2008 based cards are no longer supported. Esxi is a popular hypervisor. To get it working, you will have to use esxi 6.7 and below. The sas2008 based cards will still work fine on everything else for now as far as I know.

 

[zack$]

@zack$ Core i5-2500k does not support VT-D, so, unfortunately, no FreeNAS in a VM .
ZoL probably going to be a best overall option, but requires more expertise to maintain/upgrade (I had personal experience of upgrading ubuntu completely borked early release of ZoL, but not its much more mature now, even baked into the installer (for desktop version))
Going with FreeNAS on bare metal is another option. You still could run downloads, Plex and etc as Freenas Jails/containers or plugins with some limitations, like you won't be able to use Hardware acceleration on FreeNAS as it's underlying OS - BSD doesn't support it, at the same time I5-2500k at 4.6gh is about 10k on PassMark so it's should be able to handle at least a few videos transcodes without need for QSV or Nvidia GPU and a Plex Pass.

It is highly recommended NOT to use simple Raid5 with drives over 2TB as rebuild times are too long. with 4 drives dual parity is likely not needed, so I'd suggest raid10 or 2x VDEVs with Mirrors. 4x8TB drives should give you about 14TiB usable storage or 11TiB of practical usage (20% free space limit)

Baremetal FreeNAS or Proxmox for ZFS pool with the pools "passed" to VMs.

I've done the latter where a c2750 based MB didn't support pass-thru. Ran FreeNAS as a VM only to set up shares and run various jails. Works great and is economical on system resources.

 

[Sashinka]

Thankyou both.

I’ve decided to go the 2008 option for now. I was going to rush getting a 2308 so I could test the drives but had no confidence in the sellers w/o adequate research. I am also better off getting my head around FreeNAS first as I am new to all this.

Zack, I has another look at my cases & both only hold 6 HDD’s max & not enough cooling in the right areas to add more (in the 5.25 trays) so am going to get a Define R6 & when I decide to build a gaming rig later, can repurpose it for that & look to update my NAS with a mATX board & a purpose build NAS case later. By then I will want to expand my scope from just FreeNAS.