Ok, I've gone through most posts about freenas, n40l and ram requirements, so its pretty clear that 4gb ram will not do the job for a NAS server.
But here's our scenario:
We are a small facility (3 to 7 students/faculty), all with our laptops and responsible for personal back-ups. Occasionally though we get disorganized and we loose files between us, particularly when traveling or when students leave the lab. So we would like to install a NAS which will be mostly idle and only used in emergency situations or when in need of a file from a colleague's dataset.
We can't use the cloud because it's expensive and not permitted by our department. We also don't have budget and we have only been offered a n40l with 4gb ecc ram and 4x500gb hdd. We would be happy to use two mirrored sets as 1tb will be enough for years (in 10 years we accumulated 600gb).
For us, speed is not an issue. Most our files are relatively small, average transfer to the NAS is expected to be 1-2gb per month. We don't mind waiting for a file, as we do when downloading from the internet. Occasionally (2-3 times per year) we will need to retrieve a missing/forgotten file while being out of office. So, speed is not an issue. However, long-term reliability is absolutely important.
So, given the ECC ram and the advantages of ZFS with regards to filesystem reliability, the question is: ok, it will be slow, but will it be reliable with only 4gb ram?
Else, if ufs is the only way to go, to be honest I'd rather set-up a debian base and be done with it. But I don't want to dismiss freenass+zfs just yet.
Any opinions?
But here's our scenario:
We are a small facility (3 to 7 students/faculty), all with our laptops and responsible for personal back-ups. Occasionally though we get disorganized and we loose files between us, particularly when traveling or when students leave the lab. So we would like to install a NAS which will be mostly idle and only used in emergency situations or when in need of a file from a colleague's dataset.
We can't use the cloud because it's expensive and not permitted by our department. We also don't have budget and we have only been offered a n40l with 4gb ecc ram and 4x500gb hdd. We would be happy to use two mirrored sets as 1tb will be enough for years (in 10 years we accumulated 600gb).
For us, speed is not an issue. Most our files are relatively small, average transfer to the NAS is expected to be 1-2gb per month. We don't mind waiting for a file, as we do when downloading from the internet. Occasionally (2-3 times per year) we will need to retrieve a missing/forgotten file while being out of office. So, speed is not an issue. However, long-term reliability is absolutely important.
So, given the ECC ram and the advantages of ZFS with regards to filesystem reliability, the question is: ok, it will be slow, but will it be reliable with only 4gb ram?
Else, if ufs is the only way to go, to be honest I'd rather set-up a debian base and be done with it. But I don't want to dismiss freenass+zfs just yet.
Any opinions?
