My FreeNAS build at home - Love it!!

I have been using consumer NAS production for many years (Buffalo LinkStation, IOmega ix2, etc.). they are `fine` products and easy to use. If you just need a shared storage on your home LAN to put your files there you're probably going to happy with them.

To me - they are weak and slow, period. I built my Giga home LAN since 2006 but I wasn't able to take full advantage of it at all. I only got an average ~25 - 30 MBps rate over Giga ethernet. for bigger files might be better around 40 MBps.

It's time to say Sayonara to all the consumer NAS product.
I reviewed a lot of post from FreeNAS forum and here comes my custom build NAS server. It looks very similar to the FreeNAS mini from IXsystems..

• Motherboard: Supermicro A1SAi-2750F Avoton Octa-core 2.4GHz
• 6 Onboard SATA Ports, Quad Giga LAN port, Dedicate IPMI/iKVM

• Case: Supermicro 721TQ-250B Black Mini-Tower with 250W Flex ATX Bronze PSU

• RAM: Kingston 8GB SO-DIMM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 x 2
• Boot Drive: Supermicro SATADOM 16 GB SSD
• Hard Drives: WD Red 3 TB x 4, HGST 2.5" 500 GB x 4
• RAID: IBM Serveraid M1015 LSI-9220-8i PCIe 2.0 x8 Flashed in IT mode
• Highpoint SFF-8087 Split Cable

It's running FreeNAS 9.3 stable and it's been few weeks I'm pretty happy with it. CIFS and AFP share it's pretty much maxed out the Giga line bandwidth, I got more than 110 MBps rate for writing. NFS is a bit slow so far (~ 45MBps) from Mac so probably need to look at further..

I really love the IPMP. I did all the configuration without needing to plugin any monitor or keyboard. once you have it you don't want to buy any boards without it..

I'm now running two Jails, one is a multi-purpose WEB server, the other is my favorite - OwnCloud.. I created a few accounts for my family members and it runs very smooth so far. I have a front end Apache server at my home redirecting all the traffics to internal boxes.

The FreeNAS server I've got is my 26th network devices at my home.. I can't believe I have so many until I counted..