Hows this setup?

[yajinni]

I have some old hardware i plan on putting to use:

AMD Athlon LE-1660 2.8GHz
4 GB Ram
ATi Radeon HD 3200
Asus M3A78-EM

I was looking at FreeNas 8 since its so recommended and was a little shocked at the recommended requirements.
How will not meeting them affect file transfer speeds?

Also i have 2 2TB hard drives and 1 3 TB hard drives i plan on putting into the system. I would prefer they show up as one big pool of data, like a JBOD setup. I noted v7 said it does that but not v8?

This will be a file server serving mostly videos. Most videos are around 400mb on average size.

This will all be on a gigabit wired network if it matters.

 

[William Grzybowski]

You can run it on 4gb of RAM as long as you use install the x64 version...
However of course this might impact a bit on the performance as prefetch will be disabled, its hard to say how much. Better just install it and see if it fit your needs...
You can use those 3 disks in a one big pool (stripe) with about 7TB of usable data but then you lose redundancy (1 disk fail you lose it all)

 

[yajinni]

There is no other option than striping it to get it as one big pool?

And i guess then how good is FreeNas on picking up possible drive failures in that case?

 

[William Grzybowski]

No, unless you're willing to lose about of 3TB of usable space.. you can use a raidz with those 3 disks, but the disk of 3TB would work like it was 2TB... you would get around of 4TB of usable space