Hi!
I have been running MS Windows Home Server (v1) for quite a few years now. I am starting to have hard drive issues on my WHS, and may be close to failure. I will need to back everything up. Since this opens up an opportunity to start fresh, and WHSv1 is totally unsupported these days, I decided to look into FreeNAS to get into the 21st Century.
Booting my existing WHSv1 box to FreeNAS 9.3.x went pretty smoothly. I know that I need to add more memory (I have 2 GB now), and I only have a single-core 2.0 GHZ Celeron processor. Everything seems to run OK right now, though - so that's a very good sign.
I don't plan on doing much exciting stuff on my NAS - Just file storage and storing daily PC backups. I may look into media streaming, but it isn't needed and may not work with my existing A/V equipment, anyways.
So, here are a few "newbie" questions:
AzJazz
I have been running MS Windows Home Server (v1) for quite a few years now. I am starting to have hard drive issues on my WHS, and may be close to failure. I will need to back everything up. Since this opens up an opportunity to start fresh, and WHSv1 is totally unsupported these days, I decided to look into FreeNAS to get into the 21st Century.
Booting my existing WHSv1 box to FreeNAS 9.3.x went pretty smoothly. I know that I need to add more memory (I have 2 GB now), and I only have a single-core 2.0 GHZ Celeron processor. Everything seems to run OK right now, though - so that's a very good sign.
I don't plan on doing much exciting stuff on my NAS - Just file storage and storing daily PC backups. I may look into media streaming, but it isn't needed and may not work with my existing A/V equipment, anyways.
So, here are a few "newbie" questions:
- I will be upgrading my memory to at least 4GB, and try for 8GB (I think my HP EX485 only accepts non-ECC). Where will I see the "hit" if I only go with 4GB of RAM?
- What performance issues will I see by using the single-core 2.0 GHz Celeron processor?
- I have a 32 GB Sandisk USB 3.0 thumbdrive for my FreeNAS boot image. I'm assuming that I will still need to leave it inserted after booting, correct? The reason I ask is because the thumb drive gets warm, and I would think I would have better life out of it if it isn't powered 24/7/365. I'm not sure how well thumb drives are designed to handle being powered continuously.
- One of the most useful features (for me) of WHSv1 was folder-specific duplication. This would allow me to do full data duplication on a user-by-user basis. So, for example, I could duplicate all my data and my PC backups, but not my movies or my brother's data. The duplicated data was always placed on a different hard drive for redundancy. Does FreeNAS have this capability? (I haven't seen anything like it in the documentation).
AzJazz