Hello all

[Mr.N00bLaR]

Just signed up. I'm sure I'll be on the boards for a bit..

I first heard about FreeNAS on an overclocking forum a few years ago. I currently have an unlicensed unraid box running but the time to expand has come. I've read some of the wiki's and stickies here. FreeNAS seems like a good solution. This is for my growing home lab / media access.

I'm still debating over which motherboard and cpu to go with. I'm thinking 1366 with one l5520 or something like that with 24GB (8GBx3) of registered ecc to start. For testing / fun / learning I'll probably use this as multipurpose storage.

I am still not sure if mirroring or a few raidz2 vdevs are the way to go for me. I would like to grow as opposed to buying several hdds at once so it seems like multiple raidz2s might fit well.

 

[Yatti420]

Welcome.. You seem to have read up.. doc.freenas.org if you need any info.. As always more ram the better.. Xeon and 1366 may be overkill depending on what you want to do.. There is a decent hardware recommendation thread with decent info..

 

[Mr.N00bLaR]

I know that a Xeon is definitely going to be overkill but I will probably piece together a server from used enterprise parts on fleabay. The 1366 platform is plentiful and reasonably cheap considering its enterprise hardware. l5520s go for ~30$-50$ now-a-days I think.

I have zero experience with freebsd / freenas. I just put a test system together in vmware. Generally speaking I enjoy pointing and clicking on my blue background so, this will be an interesting ride.