Just curious, lots of experts here that spent a lot more time and money than me on NAS and data serving setups.
I have been wanting to build a FreeNAS setup for a few years, really getting down to it now picking parts and such. The reason for me is the built in error correction of ZFS and setting up mirrors or RaidZ2 to protect myself from a drive failure.
The dilemma is this. I have always run a high end gaming desktop with overclocked cpu, its on 24/7 eating up power and usually has 6 to 8 drives on it.
I have not updated my PC in the last couple of years and feel the pain when encoding videos my 2600K just is not up to snuff with some of the newer CPU's or dual cpu server boards.
As a result I have been looking at ways to use this FreeNAS box to do my video encoding, suddenly I will have 2 boxes on 24/7 and use more power etc and I may not end up with an optimal solution.
Researching the last couple of weeks I ran into Windows Storage Spaces and the ReFS format it uses. Apparently ReFS has the built in error correction to prevent data erosion just like ZFS, its built right into my Win 10 machine, and it can do Raid or Mirrors. Even more so I found a neat feature called Tiered storage where SSD and HDD work together to first use the SSD for immediate data, but then pass it off to the HDD behind the scenes later.
So benefits here are normal Windows environment, just 1 machine instead of more than one, some neat features, etc.
Is storage spaces really not so bad and could make a good NAS?
I could just go build out a new system and create this mass storage/video editing/gaming monster and probably save money in the long run and use all the systems power for any given task rather than have an asymmetric setup with 2 systems.
The other thing I was looking at is a much more complicated hypervisor setup having FreeNAS in a VM, but that seems just a bit over the top.
I have been wanting to build a FreeNAS setup for a few years, really getting down to it now picking parts and such. The reason for me is the built in error correction of ZFS and setting up mirrors or RaidZ2 to protect myself from a drive failure.
The dilemma is this. I have always run a high end gaming desktop with overclocked cpu, its on 24/7 eating up power and usually has 6 to 8 drives on it.
I have not updated my PC in the last couple of years and feel the pain when encoding videos my 2600K just is not up to snuff with some of the newer CPU's or dual cpu server boards.
As a result I have been looking at ways to use this FreeNAS box to do my video encoding, suddenly I will have 2 boxes on 24/7 and use more power etc and I may not end up with an optimal solution.
Researching the last couple of weeks I ran into Windows Storage Spaces and the ReFS format it uses. Apparently ReFS has the built in error correction to prevent data erosion just like ZFS, its built right into my Win 10 machine, and it can do Raid or Mirrors. Even more so I found a neat feature called Tiered storage where SSD and HDD work together to first use the SSD for immediate data, but then pass it off to the HDD behind the scenes later.
So benefits here are normal Windows environment, just 1 machine instead of more than one, some neat features, etc.
Is storage spaces really not so bad and could make a good NAS?
I could just go build out a new system and create this mass storage/video editing/gaming monster and probably save money in the long run and use all the systems power for any given task rather than have an asymmetric setup with 2 systems.
The other thing I was looking at is a much more complicated hypervisor setup having FreeNAS in a VM, but that seems just a bit over the top.