Hey All! I say "Getting Back Into It Again" but I never really left. Its just that my first FreeNAS build has been so trouble free over the years that I have had no need to do in serious deep dive FreeNAS research. It just worked! which is one of the beautiful things about FreeNAS! So now I am working on my second freenas build here, and hoping to get some feedback from my post over in the "FreeNAS Build Discussion" forum.
So how did I get into FreeNAS? Well my first FreeNAS build was prompted by a hard drive failure on my wife's computer which contained all those precious family photos and videos. After jumping through hoops using the various data recovery utilities to get the data back, I was successful, and then decided that we needed something more reliable than just data sitting on a single non-redundant drive waiting to fail again. That's when I built my first freenas in 2010 using an HP Microserver N36L with 8GB of ram and 4x2TB SAMSUNG HD204UI's in a RAIDZ1 vdev(i know scary right), but also kept backup copies of the precious family photos and videos on physical offline media as well.
Over the course of 9 years of 24x7 operations, only 2 drives have failed and replaced without issue on that first build. So it has been rock solid over the years, serving up nfs, samba shares, hosting video files, pictures, fileserving, and also hosting our pihole vm via bhyve. But now we are at the point where the zpool is at 95% utilized, a big freenas no no! I planned on purchasing larger drives for the microserver and just replace the existing, but then decided to see what everyone else was using in the current freenas landscape. And man have I missed alot over the last 9 years!
So after reading up on posts and recommendations from ericloewe, cyberjock, danb35, chris moore, jgreco, arwen. and the list goes on(thank you all for the great info)! I have finally decided on a new configuration that can house more drives using enterprise hardware. So I am looking forward to this exciting new build and hope that it can serve us another 9+ years as well just as the first one has.
So how did I get into FreeNAS? Well my first FreeNAS build was prompted by a hard drive failure on my wife's computer which contained all those precious family photos and videos. After jumping through hoops using the various data recovery utilities to get the data back, I was successful, and then decided that we needed something more reliable than just data sitting on a single non-redundant drive waiting to fail again. That's when I built my first freenas in 2010 using an HP Microserver N36L with 8GB of ram and 4x2TB SAMSUNG HD204UI's in a RAIDZ1 vdev(i know scary right), but also kept backup copies of the precious family photos and videos on physical offline media as well.
Over the course of 9 years of 24x7 operations, only 2 drives have failed and replaced without issue on that first build. So it has been rock solid over the years, serving up nfs, samba shares, hosting video files, pictures, fileserving, and also hosting our pihole vm via bhyve. But now we are at the point where the zpool is at 95% utilized, a big freenas no no! I planned on purchasing larger drives for the microserver and just replace the existing, but then decided to see what everyone else was using in the current freenas landscape. And man have I missed alot over the last 9 years!
So after reading up on posts and recommendations from ericloewe, cyberjock, danb35, chris moore, jgreco, arwen. and the list goes on(thank you all for the great info)! I have finally decided on a new configuration that can house more drives using enterprise hardware. So I am looking forward to this exciting new build and hope that it can serve us another 9+ years as well just as the first one has.
