Another new user with questions....

[S762]

I’m new to FreeNas, I’ve been experimenting with it for about two weeks now. I started with the previous 9.2/32bit version and just moved to the 9.3/64bit version about two days ago after it went from Beta to Release. I understand the better the hardware the better it will run but I’m not it a position to buy a new pc just to dedicate as a NAS especially when the old Dell is still humming along.

I have an old Dell GX620 with 4GB or ram and currently testing with two 80GB hard drives just to get the feel of it. Just to simulate a drive failure I replaced one after hard drive after a graceful shutdown to see what happens. I powered it back up and once I was able to navigate to the correct screen to re-add the new drive and restore the mirror. The Volume went from Degraded to Healthy so I that’s the desired result. I repeated the process a few times and all is good. I was able to add Windows shares, map a drive to it and connect my Blu-ray DVD player to it to stream video. So am I missing here? Is there any reason why it shouldn't run on these older systems as long as I don’t add a bunch of plug-ins? Please advise, thanks in advance

 

[sfcredfox]

I

I have an old Dell GX620 with 4GB or ram and currently testing with two 80GB hard drives just to get the feel of it.

People usually want to see more hardware specifics when posting, but you listed one big problem thus far: Your memory. You should read the 'Newbie Guide' from Cyberjock. It's got a ton of information you need to know. Also, you need to literally read the informational parts of the manual (RTFM).

You should probably not ignore the 8GB RAM requirement. If you don't want to upgrade your hardware to meet what FreeNAS needs, you can consider NAS4Free. From what I hear, it does a little better on old/less hardware. FreeNAS is more about using it right, or not at all.