FreeNAS build

I got a Lacie 1U NAS from a customer, it unfortunately died, the cpu fan quit working and the poor little Atom proc. melted itself.  So basically I got a 1U ITX case and power supply for free.  This gave me a good excuse to redo my shared storage in my home lab.  My requirements are that it have low power consumption, cheap, support iSCSI, and cheap.

I shopped around a bit for an ITX motherboard.  I settled on the Gigabyte GA-C1037n.  I paid roughly $103 for it shipped.  I choose this board because it has dual 1gbps NICs, it has more than one desktop ram slot, supports 16gb of ram (unfortunately it doesn't do ECC), it has an expansion slot (albeit 32-bit PCI an not PCI-X).  It only has three SATA ports, one of which is a 6gbps port.  So I am stuck at three drives, unless I use a SATA controller in the PCI slot, but MEH, if I need more space I will just put bigger drives in.  A 64bit cpu, as developers are stopping production of x86 code.  This cpu consumes a mere 17watts!  Compare that to a dual core pentium at 65 watts, or a quad core at 95.  

Celeron 1037u 1.8ghz, 1737 cpu mark, 2mb cache, 17w

Celeron 1007u 1.5ghz, 1379 cpu mark, 2mb cache, 17w

Atom D2700 2.1ghz 841cpu mark, 1mb cache, 10w

Celeron 847 1.1ghz, 985 cpu mark, 2mb cache, 17w
Intel e2160 Core2Duo 1.8ghz, 996 cpu mark, 1mb cache, 65w 

The ram was kinda sort free, as they were pulls from other projects,  so 6gb PC3 total (4gb & 2gb).  One day it will get upgraded to 16gb.  Unfortunately it is highly recommended to NOT run the ZFS file system with less than 8gb.  So UFS and 6gb for the time being, but more on that part later.

The first issue I ran into was the case need an appointment with Mr. Dremel as the sound card ports got in the way of the case.  Also the IO shield that came w/ the motherboard is too tall to fit.  The next issue was that it wouldn't power up.  The power supply that came with the case did not have the 28pin ATX motherboard connector nor did it have the 4pin ATX connector.  Unfortunately the 4pin connector is required for it to boot.  I attempted to make one by snipping a 4pin connector from a scrap power supply, and adapted it to a molex connector; no joy.  Purchased a new power supply from NewEgg for $30.  This case also has three fans in it, with a goofy two pin connector.  I ended up snipping that pig tall off of the old power supply and splicing it in on the new one, less than ideal but it will do.

FreeNAS 9.2.1 was installed on a 4gb USB thumb drive; turns out that a few of my 2gb drives (which is all that is required) where just a few bytes too small.  Two 1tb 7200rpm SATA drives are installed.  I added a Trendnet PCI 1gbps NIC, as I think what I want is to have this NIC for management, NTP, CIFS, etc.  The two onboards I will dedicated to iSCSI traffic, which is on a separate VLAN.