Franken-NAS, opinion on build with older hardware

[noee]

Greetings:
I have an old Biostar/AMD machine that has 4 SATA drives and 2 IDE drives that I've been using for a "NAS" running the venerable XP. I'm moving to FreeNAS now and I'm wanting to set up a RAID but my disks range from older Seagate IDE (200Gb) to new 2.5" Toshiba notebook drives to 3.5" Samsung 1TB drives.

After reading now for a few days, my thoughts were to just RAID-Z2 the whole thing, but I only have 3GB RAM (DDR2). Uses will be for Windows client sharing for backup and media storage and will be on a home net only.

Am I looking at issues with only 3GB or RAM and ZFS or should I just make the whole thing UFS? Are there any issues with my mix-match of hard drives?

Thx for any feedback.

 

[praecorloth]

First, just know that if you RAID-Z2 a mixed bag of drives, your space will be limited by the smallest drive in the bunch.

Second, if the largest drive you have is a 1TB drive, I'd say go for it if your processor is 64bit capable. I know someone who is running a 3TB RAID-Z on 1GB of memory and a 64bit install of FreeNAS 8.

I run a 1TB RAID-Z on 1.5GB of memory on a 32bit install. It's doable, I wrote a big long post about my experiences, and had a great time. But if you've only got a 32bit processor and you're not looking to get nerdy with your NAS, just go UFS.