Is freenas the right solution for me

[gl23leung]

Hi,

I'm looking at setting up a home nas, and wondering whether freenas is the right solution for me. The things i'm looking to do:

1. Store family photos/videos / important files
2. Store/steam movies to other devices (ie media server)
3. Download ftp/http/bt
4. run 24-hr

The thing is, i'm not prepare to get server parts (due to cost, and huge difficulty getting server parts where i leave). i'm probably only able to get regular itx board with non-ecc ram (i know it's a big no-no for dedicated nas)

so does the following works:
1. get 2 4tb wd red drive and setup raid 1 to store the important files. This way, i have redundancy, and not worry about using non-ecc ram (am i correct in this?)
2. get 1 4tb wd red drive without any raid to stores movies and other less important files. This gives me more spaces.

is this a good setup? or any better suggestions?

thanks in advance

 

[cyberjock]

No. Redundancy and even backups don't negate the ecc problem. Read the ecc vs non-ecc thread and you'll see you are buying nothing with redundancy in regards to nonecc RAM. If redundancy meant you could use bad RAM nobody would have ever lost data.

 

[L]

I have actually been thinking a lot about this lately. Without ecc ram, i risk losing all my data, but if I have a quality backup and don't mind losing a small amount of time(a day of data), I would still use zfs, with non-ecc. I actually think for my personal home system, I am getting crashplan(since there is already a plugin) or another cloud service to keep a copy(I actually do contract work for a zfs cloud provider). If my local system dies, I can fix it and bring it back. I have determined that having a day or 2 outage isn't going to kill me, vs the costs of creating a higher end system. It would really hurt if I lost the pictures of my kids as babies(they are already in icloud).. My system is only a couple TB and I like the idea of cloud in that, my house could burn down and I would still have a copy.

For the stuff that's really important to me like business contacts, docs and email, I keep on my hosting sites anyways..

 

[cyberjock]

You do realize we've had people with foolproof backup strategies still lose *everything* because of bad RAM in the base system? That's why I made it 100% clear in the nonecc vs ecc thread that backups will NOT save you.

 

[L]

I do understand the risks.. I also understand statistics. If I run zfs send to a backup it is possible to have the entire dataset or pool corrupt, the chances are small, but they are there. If I use another backup utility that uses posix symantex, I have a better chance because the backup will contain the hosted platforms metadata and not zfs metadata. At that point I may have a corrupted file, but not the entire set.

For me having a strategy is better than not having a strategy. Using a timemachine on site, is at greater risk than running this way.