My deal

[Dlukky]

Hello World,
I ran onto freenas when I was thinking about loading up a linuex server on an old machine to replace my Sansdigital 4 drive raid. I really liked the Web gui and seemed like an easier alternative to a ubuntu server.
I have a freenas box up and running on an old AMD 3500 with 1 Gig of ram and an 8 gig flash drive and 2 1tb drives mirrored. I know those specs dont add up but its working for now and it gives me a much better idea of what freenas is and is not. YES I did read enough before the build to run UFS and not ZFS.
Now I am trying to figure out How much freenas box I really need. Since I started this this whole thing to replace a $150 raid box.
I really Just want somewhere safe to keep my PHotos, Documents and movies which I will stream mostly to my kids computers. I see a lot of post about Amazing builds that are way to much for my little home network. I guess I am just trying to find the right balance.

Thanks
Dustin

 

[joeschmuck]

To be honest, if you are looking for a place to keep your photos and documents safe, and external USB hard drive and CD/DVD are the way to go. Now movies can consume some space however since those are not critical you could use another external hard drive. And you could use FreeNAS however we tell everyone, backup your critical data periodically, even FreeNAS could crash or more likely the end user kills the pool which destroys all the data.

 

[Dlukky]

I have some external drives that I keep my junk on. I really want something that is accessable from any machine in my home. I also want some redundancy for my information. I tend to switch machines around a lot so Its nice to have everything in one place. I just recently put one of my kids on a ubuntu machine and I am working to get the other child switched over. Trying to kinda ween our windows addiction.

Thanks Dustin

 

[joeschmuck]

I understand the windows addiction and I'd rather use an OS that is a bit cheaper than Windoze, that is for sure, but it's difficult to change.

FreeNAS is a very inexpensive alternative to a prebuilt NAS box and FreeNAS is feature filled as well. It's not a simple plug and play product, there is some configuration required and if you read the manual and take a few notes that would be specific to your system, you could do this very easily. Whatever you do, do not buy cheap budget line hardware, you get what you pay for. You need to figure out what you want your NAS to do, the capacity you desire [and double it], and order the parts to put it together. You could also just purchase a prebuilt FreeNAS machine if you like and the cost isn't bad at all. It holds 4 drives so if that is enough for you, that might be an option.