Best place to install with USB Ports broken!

[WAM]

Hi All,
First of all sorry if I'm asking stupid questions here. Very new to networking, freenas and even forums! Anyway, i recently bought a tablet and have little use for my old desktop. I was planning on buying a nas box until i came across freenas.

Anyway, few months ago I had a power cut which killed my mother boards usb ports (via a powered usb hub). I got around the problem with a pci usb card. More recently, I successfully manage to burn the freenas iso to dvd and install onto my 4GB usb stick as recommended.

The problem i now have is that my bios wont find the usb via the usb pci card (nb all my motherboard usb are dead). So i have 2 questions:

1) If the pci card is being booted up after the bios, how was i able to install freenas to usb?
2) If i can not boot from usb, what's the best method to install freenas considering i have 4sata ports with 4hdds at 1Tb, 1Tb, 2Tb and 2Tb?

Any help greatly appreciated....

 

[cyberjock]

1. Because the ISO loaded the USB drivers before you started installation. So the USB stick was detected. ;)
2. Whatever drive you install FreeNAS on will be useful for FreeNAS and nothing else. Don't ask how to get around it, you can't.

If there are no good USB ports your only bet is an internal drive. I'd get the smallest drive you can buy and use that.

I will warn you that "old desktops" are NOT suitable for 99% of FreeNAS installations. Read the FreeNAS manual for the hardware requirements, they are fairly steep.. 8GB of RAM(ECC recommended), Intel NIC, etc. I'd bet dollars to donuts your system is not going to work well.

 

[WAM]

Hey Cyberjock,
Thanks for the reply. Sounds like i maybe better getting a nas after all. My desktop had 4gb Ram and 3.6ghz dual core. The most demanding thing I'd require would be streaming hd films. What do you think - am i wasting my time?

 

[xiSlickix]

Hey Cyberjock,
Thanks for the reply. Sounds like i maybe better getting a nas after all. My desktop had 4gb Ram and 3.6ghz dual core. The most demanding thing I'd require would be streaming hd films. What do you think - am i wasting my time?

Your desktop is probably fine to be used as a NAS.. just maybe not with FreeNAS. There are a lot of tutorials around for turning your desktop into a "NAS" with lots of different operating systems. You won't get ZFS, but if this is your first build you might be in over your head anyway. Ubuntu (or the lighter weight version Xubuntu) can easily be configured to be used as a NAS (and there are a lot of tutorials and youtube videos showing you how to do so). Windows as well can server the purpose if need be. And, if you are trying to make your media accessible to your tablet, check out Plex (media streaming / sharing software that runs on just about every OS).

 

[cyberjock]

I wouldn't recommend it without 8GB of RAM. I put the warnings in the manual about data loss, so you can get my opinion from the manual. ;)

 

[gpsguy]

Frankly if a "power cut" broke the USB ports, I'd be weary of using the mobo for anything serious.

Perhaps you could frame it and sell it as modern art. ;-)


Sent from my phone

 

[WAM]

Hey all, thanks for the advice. Sounds like you've saved me hours of research and failure!