5 year old hardware - Will it FreeNAS?

[FoulG]

The problem with this list is not the age. The problem is that it is gaming hardware, not server hardware.
If you have no choice because of budget limitations, you can probably get it to work, but it could be better (more reliability) with better hardware.

Budget limitations is, indeed, the reason for re-purposing the hardware. And I do agree that server hardware would make for a more reliable system.

Did you look at the hardware guide?

I did.

Has a Realtek 8111GR onboard NIC. Better use a Intel GBit PCIe NIC instead if you want to use this hardware as Realtek NICs have driver issues in FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

Also do a Hardware Validation/Burnin before putting the hardware into service. See for example Chapter 4 of Uncle Fester's Basic FreeNAS 9.10 Configuration Guide.

Regarding the NIC, I'll have to look into that.
I definitely plan to do some form of validation/burn-in. I will check out the link you provided.

This is not an ideal group of disks, but we have some options here.
Before I throw an idea at you, how did you plan to arrange these disks into storage?

The WD 500 GB drives were/are in the re-purposed system. As long as the Samsung 2 TB drives test OK, I won't be using the WD 500 GB drives, I'll use the WD Red's and 3 or 4 of the Samsungs. I have no thoughts yet as to how many or size of logical drives. My wife has even suggested using the WD Red's in the FreeNAS system and replacing the failing motherboard on the existing WHS system and using it with the 4 2TB drives as a backup system while our "high value" files live on FreeNAS and are backed up to Backblaze or similar.

I was going to suggest pulling the SMART reports off the 2Tb drives. If they were on the failing Windows Server, maybe they were configured for power saving, and spent a lot of time spun down. If that's the case the 2Tb drives might have some life left in them. Cycle count might be kind of high though...

Pulling the SMART reports is a good idea. I'll have to figure out how to do that. ;) The 2TB drives were/are on the failing system, (a controller going bad according to the system logs). According to the chkdsk run by WHS, the drives themselves are "healthy". I'll put them through extra testing to make sure. I didn't set them for power saving and as far as I know, they've been spinning for the past 7 years almost non-stop.


For now, I need a no/low cost system to house 2 to 3 TB of files where they can be accessed by the family and to provide space for backups from 3 or 4 PCs. All-in-all, around 7 TB. The WHS system ran reliably for the past 7 years. I'm sure this FreeNAS system will do at least as well once I deal with the obvious issues.

 

[Stux]

Can't write it off. But that's $720 before you even get started. I can save that $720 by borrowing my wife's car 1 day a week over 3 years... Probably less.

I solve the cost by providing an offsite server somewhere. Then replicating to that.

Generally Yoh can find someone who’d like a NAS ;)

 

[Inxsible]

Generally Yoh can find someone who’d like a NAS ;)

Yup, I asked a friend if he'd be willing to house my backup server. Him being non-technical, he asked if he could store his files on my machine and I said "No, but you can watch all the movies and music that I have ripped anytime you want".
And a deal was made. All I had to do is set up Plex client on his TV