Thanks for the update and glad to hear it is positive overall.
In general, I'm pretty happy with the purchase. From a hardware standpoint, there hasn't been a lick of trouble -- though that other thread is a reminder that I really should check the drive temps.
I would imagine that the 8-bay case with 2 x 120mm fans should be pretty quiet and keep the drives nice and cool too.
I checked the drives the other night -- all 4 running at 35C. That's with all drives on the left hand side. I didn't skip any drive bays when I put the drives in.
If I remember correctly, that mobo has PWM fan controllers so you should be able to slow the fans down if required.
It does, but I'm not sure if FreeBSD/FreeNAS supports that. There's certainly nothing in the FreeNAS UI, and I haven't bothered to dig for the info on FreeBSD.
I would say the noisiest fan would be the small one in the PSU.
Yup. Some people have swapped the case fans with more expensive fans with better bearings, but I haven't seen the need.
After checking out the FreeNAS forums, I stumbled across NAS4Free which is a fork of the original FreeNAS. Judging by the comments on
this blog, N4F is considerably less resource-intensive than FN but at the cost of limited functionality eg plugins.
I saw N4F, and discarded it as an option pretty quickly. I liked that FreeNAS has a company throwing resources at it. If I don't use the plugins, then I'll see roughly the same resource usage.
That is good news about the transcoding, I understand H.265 is pretty intensive to transcode?
Yes. Gotta put those 8 cores to use somehow, right.
