Home ESX / NAS build

[gmui]

Here's what I'm intending to put together for a home NAS server and would appreciate any comments / suggestions and am intending to start buying things today. Usage right now is to replace an older Freenas build that holds everything ranging from important documents, photos and videos. It may also end up serving as an NFS mount for VMs running on this hardware as well as other remote ESXi servers.

This is for home use so performance is not absolutely critical but speed and expandability are always nice.

The only components I have so far are the 6 2TB drives and an IBM M1015 (from ebay).

My intentions are to virtualize FreeNas for the option of taking advantage of the server with VMs. I will also add more drives, up to 2 M1015s and memory as usage goes up. I may end up getting another 8GB right away but wanted to see if it's sufficient in case 8GB sticks come down in price.

For ZFS, I would start with 1 6 drive vdev in the pool and then add more 6 drive vdevs as I can afford to and need.

I know I'll need some cables and fans, etc but these are the important parts I want to verify and order first.

Thanks,
Gary

EDIT:
Adding these cables:

2 NORCO C-SFF8087-D SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 Internal Multilane SAS Cables - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133034

 

[lazybummm]

To be honest, Intel was too expensive for me, so I went AMD:

X6 1045T 6-core
Asus M5A97 motherboard (supports VT-D and ECC ram)
16GB of ECC ram

Mobo+CPU cost me about $150, and the ram, another $120.

That's what I am running my ESXI 5 and FreeNAS 8.0.4 on. It's not fully up and running it though. I thought I had everything up and running, but when I tried to transfer 600gb of data from one hard drive, FreeNAS crashed somehow. FreeNAS virtualized can be tricky, there is another thread discussing it, may be a good read.

 

[gmui]

To be honest, Intel was too expensive for me, so I went AMD:

X6 1045T 6-core
Asus M5A97 motherboard (supports VT-D and ECC ram)
16GB of ECC ram

Mobo+CPU cost me about $150, and the ram, another $120.

That's what I am running my ESXI 5 and FreeNAS 8.0.4 on. It's not fully up and running it though. I thought I had everything up and running, but when I tried to transfer 600gb of data from one hard drive, FreeNAS crashed somehow. FreeNAS virtualized can be tricky, there is another thread discussing it, may be a good read.

Yeah, it's not cheap which is why I'm hoping to virtualize the server. I have other ESX hosts (Dell PE1850 and Dell PE 1950) but want the option to do more with it. Not sure yet though if I go with FreeNas 8 or try out OI-NappIT