Bomber
Dabbler
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2017
- Messages
- 11
I'm setting a new FreeNAS box after many years of using a WD Sharespace but the controller has died twice, the first time under warranty (which saw a brand new box and hard drives being supplied as a replacement) and the second box just recently some 5 years after it being provided by WD. I did lots of reading first and have chosen to implement FreeNAS as the best compromise *for me* of hardware price, performance, data security and ease of use; choosing not to be dependent on a hardware vendor in the future even though it will be a steep learning curve.
I've been in the IT game one way or another since 1980, so I know my way around systems but I've probably become a jack of all trades and a master of none compared to many of you folk. The "C" word (compromise) has been a driving factor in my freeNAS choice so I know there are ways that my hardware is less than optimal according to many here but I know enough to minimise the risks and to to mitigate the risks should a pool fail. I am a home user, looking to use the NAS as a storage pool both of us can access and as a local PC backup device.
I cut my computer teeth on PFS File on an Apple II, getting it to do things the manual reckoned couldn't be done (like reports presented in columns) before graduating to VAX and later Unix based minicomputers, all while still at college, before going out to teach high school and "introducing" computers into the curriculum for the first time in some cases. If the arrival of the Apple IIe caused great excitement, imagine the euphoria of a Fat Mac! My first hard drive, 40MB, cost me almost a weeks wages second hand...
I left high schools to teach adults at Uni and TAFE level and quickly realised that I was teaching them the same "how to in Application X" stuff I had been teaching the 13 year olds and it wouldn't be long before they would be the adults ( now using up to date stuff like WordPerfect, Lotus and dBASE III!) and I'd soon be out of a job. I trained as an accountant and spent a further 15 years in business analyst / systems accountant / vendor end user support type roles. However one too many recessions and periods of unemployment saw me leave those roles post the dot com crash and "just be an accountant", so my knowledge is now rusty and no doubt in some areas out of date. I've been retired for about 5 years and 90% of my data these days is photos - many bad but some great; the beauty of "going digital" is that it costs me nothing but hard disk space to keep chasing (feathered) birds across the desert or through the rainforest until I get a photo good enough for my coffee table photo books...
Oh, and if you're wondering, the picture is my 1948 Willys Jeepster, Willys' only attempt at a Jeep sports car and therefore the direct ancestor of the Grand Cherokee Trackhawk. We know of only 6 in Australia.
I've been in the IT game one way or another since 1980, so I know my way around systems but I've probably become a jack of all trades and a master of none compared to many of you folk. The "C" word (compromise) has been a driving factor in my freeNAS choice so I know there are ways that my hardware is less than optimal according to many here but I know enough to minimise the risks and to to mitigate the risks should a pool fail. I am a home user, looking to use the NAS as a storage pool both of us can access and as a local PC backup device.
I cut my computer teeth on PFS File on an Apple II, getting it to do things the manual reckoned couldn't be done (like reports presented in columns) before graduating to VAX and later Unix based minicomputers, all while still at college, before going out to teach high school and "introducing" computers into the curriculum for the first time in some cases. If the arrival of the Apple IIe caused great excitement, imagine the euphoria of a Fat Mac! My first hard drive, 40MB, cost me almost a weeks wages second hand...
I left high schools to teach adults at Uni and TAFE level and quickly realised that I was teaching them the same "how to in Application X" stuff I had been teaching the 13 year olds and it wouldn't be long before they would be the adults ( now using up to date stuff like WordPerfect, Lotus and dBASE III!) and I'd soon be out of a job. I trained as an accountant and spent a further 15 years in business analyst / systems accountant / vendor end user support type roles. However one too many recessions and periods of unemployment saw me leave those roles post the dot com crash and "just be an accountant", so my knowledge is now rusty and no doubt in some areas out of date. I've been retired for about 5 years and 90% of my data these days is photos - many bad but some great; the beauty of "going digital" is that it costs me nothing but hard disk space to keep chasing (feathered) birds across the desert or through the rainforest until I get a photo good enough for my coffee table photo books...
Oh, and if you're wondering, the picture is my 1948 Willys Jeepster, Willys' only attempt at a Jeep sports car and therefore the direct ancestor of the Grand Cherokee Trackhawk. We know of only 6 in Australia.
