The goal of this machine was to be a “small, inexpensive, bring your own HDs, standalone backup solution”.
For these purposes, that meant using a small case that still had at least 2 internal 3.5″ bays.
For Freenas, 9.2.1.9 was the latest version where the .img file was available. 9.3 is available, but only as an .iso file. Another item of note when using the .img on a USB drive: booting the first time, it will appear to hang after showing “waiting up to 5 seconds for ixdiagnose to finish”. It isn’t stuck – it is just resizing your filesystem on the USB. It took mine about 9 minutes to finish this step. After the first boot completes this step, it does not stall there ever again.
Some facts on the CPU: it is currently #471 on PassMark [3,777] cpubenchmark.net. It has a “value” rating of 58.7. Intel is producing so many clones of the Xeon E5, at so many different clock speeds, that the first sub-$1000 CPU is #28 (core-i7 5930K@3.50GHz, $580). The only core-i7 that is sub-$300 is the $299 i7 4790@3.6GHz at #58 with a score of 10,105, and a “value” of 32.4. It used to be fun to get a CPU in the top 50, but it looks like that will never happen again.
All product links are from the actual vendor.
| Item | Product | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Pentium G3450 Haswell Dual-Core 3.4Ghz Socket 1150 53W | $90 |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance 4GB (1 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model CMZ4GX3M1A1600C9 | $44 |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE GA-B85M-HD3 LGA 1150 Intel B85 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX | $71 |
| Power Supply | TFX 275W Power Supply, with case | – |
| Video | Intel HD Graphics, built in | – |
| Case | APEX DM-387 Black Steel Micro ATX Media Center / Slim HTPC Computer Case w/ ATX12V TFX 275W Power Supply | $57 |
| USB Drive | Kingston Digital 8GB DataTraveler Micro USB 2.0 (DTMCK/8 GB) | $6 |
| HD Drive | BYOD | $50-$400 |
| BD/DVD/CD | None | – |
| Keyboard | – | – |
| OS | Freenas 9.2.1.9 64bit | $0 |
| Total | – | $268 + drives |