hardware for home use large storage

[Daniel Engberg]

While I'm not a heavy FreeBSD user I can offer you some advice on
hardware at least based on my own experience.

If you want things to work as good as possible go with Intel chipset
and LAN. AMD chipsets works (mostly) but you'll have worse performance
and you wont get an Intel NIC which performs much better than Realtek
or Attansic. which you usually find on AMD motherboards.

A general tip is to go for business chipsets as Intel like to call
them, Q35 (I have a few of those and they work very good), Q45 and
Q57. By doing so you can be sure to get Intel NIC and they aren't much
more expensive than your average motherboard and also usually carries
some kind of remote management.

Having in mind that FreeBSD may/may not support the newest hardware
around I'd guess that Q57 needs -CURRENT for now but I would highly
recommend it as Socket 775 is slowly dying.

ASUS P7Q57-M DO looks like a very nice board if you want "bleeding
edge" have in mind though as time of writing support for NIC doesn't
seem to be in FreeBSD but I guess its a short matter of time
(82578DM). Pair it with the slowest Core i3 CPU you can find and you
have a very nice solution. If you step up to i5 you get hardware
encryption =)

If you want legacy Intel DQ45CB should be a pretty nice choice with
supported LAN out of the box. Intel Pentium E6300 should be more than
enough for storage.

Both MSI and Gigabyte also makes Q-chipsets motherboards but they
don't seem to widely available in the US and their boards should be
fine too.

Since you want to have more than 5 HDDs you need a controller card of
some sort, in that case I would recommend you to have a look at the
Supermicro ones mentioned in the post.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=59735&postcount=5
UIO is just a backwards PCIe slot so turning it around till make it
fit although you mean need to secure it somehow. They may be a bit
hard to find but you can find a few sellers on eBay too. What I don't
know is how the motherboards will react if you pop one in which you
need to do some research on.

As for memory you'll need at least 2Gb but 4Gb is highly recommended
if you're going to use ZFS. Just make sure the sticks follows JEDEC
standards and you'll be fine (Corsair Value Select series or stock
Crucial are fine).

//Daniel