Best Sharing type for my system (Windows 7 ultimate and Android)

[PsychoFred]

Hello guys,

I just bought some hardware to build my own NAS:


1 x CORSAIR XMS3 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (will upgrade this to 8GB or 16GB)
1 x LIAN LI PC-Q25B Black Aluminum Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case
1 x Diablotek DA Series PSDA250 250W ATX Power Supply
1 x ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 (1.0GHz, dual core) AMD Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
1 x WD RED 3TB Hard drive (will buy the second one in some months)

I did a lot of reading about freenas and I'm still wondering about which Share type I should use. The NAS will be used principally for movies and music. The devices used to access the stuff will be:

HTPC probably running Win7 ultimate (maybe windows 8 with XBMC)
Desktop PC running Win7 ultimate
Android phone (galaxy S2)
Android Tablet (Galaxy note 10.1)

Here is my questions:

I know that its now possible to mount NFS share with android and that windows 7 ultimate is also compatible. But should I stick to CIFS for better compatibility with windows?

I would also like to know if I really need ZFS since I'm not going to use any Raid configuration for now. Is ZFS better or faster than NTFS for any obvious reason?

Also, I already have a 2TB NTFS here (half full of movies) Should I copy the files to the 3T disk or just share it as another "pool"?

Can we use 2 different disk capacity in software RAID-0 ? (if so, the pool size will be equal to the less capacity from the 2 disks?)

Sorry for the noob questions but I don't want to mess this up and have to lose too many time configuring and transferring terabytes of data...

Fred

 

[Stephens]

I have all kinds of concerns about the configuration you've described, but most of them can be addressed at least in party by asking... why are you using FreeNAS instead of just sharing your 1 disk using Windows?

- You need to read cyberjock's guide on ZFS.
- I use CIFS. There's no need to make your life complicated.
- It's hard to believe you did a lot of reading about FreeNAS and didn't come across any explanation for why ZFS is "better" than NTFS, but I'll take your word on it. Bottom line... your choices using FreeNAS are UFS or ZFS, not NTFS.
- Any NTFS support in FreeNAS is meant just to copy data to your pool. You don't use those disks as part of a pool.
- This is covered in the manual and cyberjock's guide. Yes, it'll use the size of the smallest disk.

Better that you asked these questions now as I don't think you're quite ready to go live yet.

 

[PsychoFred]

Up and running

Thanks for your info! The "cyberjock's guide" was very instructive. My NAS is up and running since last Thursday. I had some issues with LAN speed but I run ifconfig -a in shell console and I saw a message about a 100mbps "media". I replaced the cable between the NAS and the gigabit router and now I can copy file to the NAS with an average speed of 60MBps, which is not bad for a no Raid setup. :)