Re-purposing old gaming PC

[pegabee]

Hi Everyone

I'm about to upgrade my old gaming PC, which i think is still powerful enough so planning to turn it into a DIY NAS.
The motherboard will be an Asus Maximus VI Impact with 1150 socket, I will have my core i5 4570K in it, overclocked probably to around 4GHZ. + 16GB DDR3 Ram.

MY question is: this motherboard only has 4 SATA connections but I'd like to have a bigger NAS, with 8-10 HDDs so I will likely need to use the boards PCI-e slot for a SATA controller with 6-8 connections. I have not done this before, so would ask a few questions:

1) Given that this is additional hardware on top of the motherboard, I assume it will require driver installation - does FreeNAS support this ? or in lamer terms, will I be able to make a card like this functional at all with this OS ?
2) Assuming the answer to the question above is YES, can anyone recommend the reliable card that would work well with FreeNAS and could support 10TB drives ?

 

[BigDave]

1) For additional data ports for hard drive expansion it's best to use a Host Bus Adapter card with FreeNAS. SATA controller cards are not the way to go.

2) HBA/RAID cards can be purchased used off ebay for around $100. you can search for ones like this...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRa...568988&hash=item41b2f5eea8:g:v20AAOSw9NdXp9oI

A Word of caution, avoid buying from overseas as the possibility of counterfeit products increases dramatically, if you buy the genuine article, it will provide many years of service.

Please read this thread and resource to learn more.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/

And of course we always point newbies like yorself to this resource as well...
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

 

[danb35]

Given that this is additional hardware on top of the motherboard, I assume it will require driver installation - does FreeNAS support this ? or in lamer terms, will I be able to make a card like this functional at all with this OS ?

FreeNAS does not support driver installation, but any of the hardware you should be using has drivers built into FreeNAS already anyway. The recommended cards for drive expansion are the LSI/Broadcom/Avago 2008/2308/3008-based SAS host bus adapters, which are well supported by the base OS.

I'd caution you that your existing hardware doesn't very well match what's recommended--the characteristics that make for a good gaming machine aren't the same as what makes for a good FreeNAS server.

 

[Ericloewe]

The best use for that system is as a gaming PC, not a server. And it'd make an excellent gaming PC, too, hardly in need of an upgrade.

 

[Stux]

Maybe sell it and buy a used supermicro server?