Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 Wishing to move from a JBOD setup to something more organized and get the drives out of my workstation. Both my stepson and wife are going to be getting new laptops in the near future. As such, I will be able to repurpose their current desktops as servers. Looking at FreeNAS as an OS for these machines. What are your experiences with it as opposed to an all-in-one NAS box like QNAP, Synology or ReadyNAS. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SikSlayer 197 Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 (edited) I too am looking into this sort of thing, I've always heard positive things about FreeNAS. I'm looking into QNAP, Synology, or ReadyNAS support personally, but having FreeNAS support for the DIY users is ideal, in many ways more important/a bigger priority than the commercial NAS boxes. Edited June 7, 2014 by SikSlayer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 7, 2014 Author Share Posted June 7, 2014 I am just looking to save some upfront costs here. Repurposing existing machines into servers would save quite a bit. Just have to balance the savings in cost with the time requirements to get things up and running I guess. Thanks for the feedback. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beardyname 194 Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 (edited) FreeNAS is awesome if you already have the hardware for it, the energy cost will be higher but otherwise it will be better Edited June 7, 2014 by Beardyname Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 7, 2014 Author Share Posted June 7, 2014 Not really worried about energy costs. Discounting the Air Conditioning, my monthly electric bill is about $75.00. With Air Conditioning it is $300 from June to September. Natural Gas bill is about $20 a month year round. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KRA 39 Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 Freenas9 really needs server grade hardware, it used to be a solution for repurpose old hardware to work as a NAS, but the current solution is more high end. You don't want a ZFS file system running on old hardware. You need plenty of ECC ram or one day you wake up with all your data gone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 7, 2014 Author Share Posted June 7, 2014 Hmm. Thanks. Will have to keep looking. Will be improving the hardware but not outright replacing all components. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeeMac 17 Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 This question is too vague. Can you define your needs more precisely? Just storage or something more? From win7/win8, whs, or even linux with centos/ubuntu/fedora/suse,etc with minimal installs could be the solution. Each can provide redudant storage. Also, Have you checked out nas4free? Its the original freenas. If you do not need Zfs, perhaps freenas/nas4free could still work for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 7, 2014 Author Share Posted June 7, 2014 (edited) Primarily one box would be storage. The other will probably be a database and web server. Don't know which one will be which. One is a dual-core Pentium from before the I series. The other is a quad-core AMD machine. Both have about a terabyte of storage and are running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit currently. For storage, I just want a box that holds 20-30 terabytes of space. I will probably add SSD drives to both and make sure their memory is working properly. After that I will remove their Nvidia graphic cards and either use onboard video or run them headless. Currently everything runs on my workstation, MediaBrowser, apache, mural, etc... Edited June 7, 2014 by Wayne Luke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c0m3r 95 Posted June 8, 2014 Share Posted June 8, 2014 I looked into FreeNAS and the various linux distros for re-purposing an old machine just as you intend to do. As mentioned above, FreeNAS is no longer the easy solution it was and I intended to use one machine for everything including the media browser server. I decided in the end to stick with a stripped down Windows 7. Had it lying around already and obviously MB was windows only at the time so was the only real choice. Also I use media center master to organise and fetch my media and this too is windows only. It might not be the perfect solution for a server but in terms of ease of setup and use, I cant fault it. My old machine is a Q6600, 8GB RAM, 8TB HDDs and an SSD for the OS. Not had an issue yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6771 Posted June 8, 2014 Share Posted June 8, 2014 @ - have you looked at pooling software, such as Drive Bender and the like? I run it on Windows 7 and I never have any issues playing/streaming media from it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 8, 2014 Author Share Posted June 8, 2014 I have looked at drive pooling but trying to get as much information as possible before making a decision.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeeMac 17 Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 Perhaps check out Windows 8 Storage spaces Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 19, 2014 Author Share Posted June 19, 2014 I don't use Windows 8. Not even sure the computers in question can run it. Thanks for the suggestion though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beardyname 194 Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/the-ars-nas-distribution-shootout-freenas-vs-nas4free/ Some Light reading on the subject Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TugboatBill 13 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 Look into unraid. It has some big advantages - you can build a unraid server from just about any hardware. You can mix drives of different sizes (the parity drive has to be as big as the largest drive in the array). Easy to expand. Supports up to 24 drives. Supports 1 drive failure with no data loss. Support community is quite good. Boots from a usb drive, no OS drive needed. Downsides - Doesn't support more than one drive failure. If more than one drive fails then the data on the failed drives is lost. IE In most NASs If you run a RAID5 array with 6 drives and 2 drives fail you lose all the data. With unraid the data on the drives that didn't fail is still accessable. Since the parity drive is the hardest used likely it would fail before a data drive did. So with a 6 drive unraid box w/2 drives failed you would lose the data on one drive (2 is possible if 2 data drives failed). This is all a bit academic though, because when a drive fails you would just replace it before another drive failed. FreeNAS, synology, qnap, etc allow raid 6 type setups where you can lose 2 drives and the array will still function without data loss. Unraid isn't free, at least for more than 3 drives. 3 drives allows you to go up to 12TB (3 - 6TB drives) for free, well at least for the software. It can be slow when writing to the array - Unraid is designed to be used more for media that as an interactive storage device. You can use a cache drive (SSD for speed) to speed up writes significantly. Personally, I would not use any single parity setup for more than about 10 drives except perhaps unraid. Any NAS with drive protection has to undergo a large data rebuild when a failed drive is replaced. So just when your array is most vulnerable you're going to be subjecting it to the greatest stress you can - a parity rebuild. With currently available drive capacity and many drives a rebuild could take days to complete. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted June 20, 2014 Author Share Posted June 20, 2014 Thanks for the information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meep 1 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 Second unraid as a good solution. New virtualisation features also mean you can run more than just storage on the same system. Check out my blog which catalogs my own build experiences; mediaserver8.blogspot.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simono5 21 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 Using Xpenology on a HP N54L microserver. Superb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14913 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 I liked unRaid when I ran it but the biggest drawback for me with it is the format of the file system. This is the main reason I moved to FlexRaid - it uses standard Windows file formats. I can take a drive and read it with any Windows OS. This became important on more than one occasion when I needed to access something on a single drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SikSlayer 197 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 (edited) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/the-ars-nas-distribution-shootout-freenas-vs-nas4free/ Some Light reading on the subject That article made me revisit the subject in another thread yesterday I believe...... about the possibility of there being a MB3 FeeNAS plugin. Edited June 20, 2014 by SikSlayer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TugboatBill 13 Posted June 22, 2014 Share Posted June 22, 2014 I liked unRaid when I ran it but the biggest drawback for me with it is the format of the file system. This is the main reason I moved to FlexRaid - it uses standard Windows file formats. I can take a drive and read it with any Windows OS. This became important on more than one occasion when I needed to access something on a single drive. U can do that with the unraid drives. It requires you download and install a driver, but once done you can read the drives on any Windows box (unsure about Win 8). You cannot write to those drives though from Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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