Hi I'm a new FreeNas 8.3 user. I had used hardware raid 1 and 0 in past both software and adaptec and promise cards.
I own a WD worldbook NAS (1TB) its was cheap and slow. Gets 12mb/sec r/w over gigalan. Its 3 years old and have to say reliable so far.
I had a old A64 single core laying around a 3200+ venice core. Only has 2 gigs of ram (maxed) 4 SATA ports.
Case has room for 6 drives.
I removed vid card, sound card so keep power usage down. Things i purchaced to get it going.
1. Rosewill RC-404 Ethernet Card reg PCI gigabit. $12.00 on newegg. Drivers in freenas worked
2. two 1 TB 7200rpm Toshiba HDs for 50.00 each.
3. 2 cheap 4 gig USB sticks. $3.00 each at computer center. They are slow 4mB/sec
So $118.00 total
I just wanted a external drive for backups and a central drive for 3dsmax farm rendering.
I decided to Raid 1 it then add pairs of Raid 1 to zpool. I might by 2 more drives so I can stripe the two raid 1s for raid 10. I think that will destroy all data to do that so better do it now that later. Not sure how much faster striping will make it as i think the cpu and ram is holding it back some.
I benched it with some file copies from my Win7 pc from a SSD.
Copy a 3 gig ISO file was 38 mB/sec to NAS and 50mB/sec from nas to win7 machine.
So its 4-5 times faster than my worldbook drive.
They said under 4 gigs would not work in freenas 8.3 but it does. You just lose prefetch caching but does not seem to hurt it much for my needs.
Applications I used to set it up.
1. win32diskimager-v0.7-binary
2. USB Image Tool.exe 1.61
To make the bootable USB i tried two different apps and found one much easier than that other.
win32 disk imager. just need to take path info and just use file name in win7
ie. P:/OS install files/FreeNAS/Create USB boot drive/win32diskimager-v0.7-binary/FreeNAS_x64.img
just use filename FreeNAS_x64.img without the path info. Works fine if image file in same path as win32 imager.
Once I got a working NAS boot USB drive with configuration. I ran USB image tool and made a backup to a file.
Then I took that backup image and used image tool 1.61 to a second blank usb drive.
I just taped the extra USB drive to back of my case so if it fails I can just pop in back up. Anytime I make significant changes to the NAS config I just reimage the boot USB. I did this because I did have a bad USB stick, but what do ya want for 3.00 per stick. I've never had issues with better quality USB like HP, Sansdisk etc.
So far I really like freeNas 8.3. I like EZ and it was very ez to set up.
I own a WD worldbook NAS (1TB) its was cheap and slow. Gets 12mb/sec r/w over gigalan. Its 3 years old and have to say reliable so far.
I had a old A64 single core laying around a 3200+ venice core. Only has 2 gigs of ram (maxed) 4 SATA ports.
Case has room for 6 drives.
I removed vid card, sound card so keep power usage down. Things i purchaced to get it going.
1. Rosewill RC-404 Ethernet Card reg PCI gigabit. $12.00 on newegg. Drivers in freenas worked
2. two 1 TB 7200rpm Toshiba HDs for 50.00 each.
3. 2 cheap 4 gig USB sticks. $3.00 each at computer center. They are slow 4mB/sec
So $118.00 total
I just wanted a external drive for backups and a central drive for 3dsmax farm rendering.
I decided to Raid 1 it then add pairs of Raid 1 to zpool. I might by 2 more drives so I can stripe the two raid 1s for raid 10. I think that will destroy all data to do that so better do it now that later. Not sure how much faster striping will make it as i think the cpu and ram is holding it back some.
I benched it with some file copies from my Win7 pc from a SSD.
Copy a 3 gig ISO file was 38 mB/sec to NAS and 50mB/sec from nas to win7 machine.
So its 4-5 times faster than my worldbook drive.
They said under 4 gigs would not work in freenas 8.3 but it does. You just lose prefetch caching but does not seem to hurt it much for my needs.
Applications I used to set it up.
1. win32diskimager-v0.7-binary
2. USB Image Tool.exe 1.61
To make the bootable USB i tried two different apps and found one much easier than that other.
win32 disk imager. just need to take path info and just use file name in win7
ie. P:/OS install files/FreeNAS/Create USB boot drive/win32diskimager-v0.7-binary/FreeNAS_x64.img
just use filename FreeNAS_x64.img without the path info. Works fine if image file in same path as win32 imager.
Once I got a working NAS boot USB drive with configuration. I ran USB image tool and made a backup to a file.
Then I took that backup image and used image tool 1.61 to a second blank usb drive.
I just taped the extra USB drive to back of my case so if it fails I can just pop in back up. Anytime I make significant changes to the NAS config I just reimage the boot USB. I did this because I did have a bad USB stick, but what do ya want for 3.00 per stick. I've never had issues with better quality USB like HP, Sansdisk etc.
So far I really like freeNas 8.3. I like EZ and it was very ez to set up.
