My experiance... X86 users take note. May help.

[Ragmanii]

I have on old 32 bit server I inherited and I put freenas 8.x on it long ago. I upgraded semiannual and had great expectations. I got all the way to FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x86 (a752d35) no issues! (Thanks Developers!) And then everything fell apart. What happened between 9.1.1 and 9.2? Dont know I could never figure it out... here is the long story:

I got an old adaptec SATA server... put in 4 4TB drives... formatted with ZFS on 8.0 I think it was. Had a great time. Upgraded though the times. I have two dedicated 8GB USB sticks that I religiously swapped out on upgrades... You never know what may happen right? So I got to 9.2 and every time I upgraded 9.2 would completely barf when I tried to import the ZFS store. Anyone have any clue what changed between 9.1.1 and 9.2? I dont. Every time a new version came out I tried the upgrade again just to see. Every time I tried to import the ZFS the system would completely BARF and when I say barf I MEAN BARF! the console output would scroll for about 2 seconds and then reboot. If I try and import my settings file it would say something about corruption and lock up and make that particular stick dead.

Anyways Here is the short lesson.... if you have an old x86 system and want it STABLE go with 9.1.1 I have been using it for about 2 years without issue. I buy all my bluerays and upload them to my box and can get them on demand.

Just kinda strange that I can boot up 9.2 but as soon as I try and import my legacy 9.1.1 drives it completely fails. Note: It does not corrupt anything on my old legacy 9.1.1 drive, I put the old stick back in and BOOM! Got all my stuff back... and yes, I have put 9.1.1 on the other stick and imported my ZFS store without issue and created all jails and apps that I like. It just seems to be the 9.2 upgrade that fails. I have tried shell zfs and zpool as well, no joy.


My hardware:
Non 64-bit processor... I cant remember off hand but I believe it is an old celeron two core. The hardware is made by adaptec.

3 GB ram (upgraded from 1, 4GB makes this MB choke and not boot so it is the best I can do).
4 x 4TB drives (ZFS so 12 gigs storage.)
I get more than enough bandwidth out of this server. I have never had a complaint about speed.
I am not on here often so questions/comments/flames could be unanswered for all eternity.

Posting this just to help if someone like me has access to reliable equipment that does not support x64.

 

[Ericloewe]

This is everything but surprising, given that the minimum requirement for ZFS is 8GB of RAM.

 

[jgreco]

In the early '90's our general services servers each had 8MB RAM. By the mid '90's that was 32MB, and then by the late '90's 128MB. Today we usually don't even make a trite VM with less than 256MB... this was due to FreeBSD itself getting bigger (kernel and a mini userland used to fit on a floppy!), installed programs getting much bigger, more Internet traffic, more users, faster networks, etc.

ZFS was designed from day one to take advantage of the massive compute and memory resources of a large Sun server. Unlike a traditional UFS/FFS based FreeBSD system, the filesystem itself was always expected to occupy a substantial amount of RAM. FreeNAS was never aimed at small memory systems. There are lots of NAS products that are, some of which will operate on tiny memory systems, and some like NAS4Free which incorporate ZFS and will work on somewhat-smaller systems. The FreeNAS devs decided to explore the other end of it, and basically the middleware itself is expected to occupy several GB of RAM, and ZFS needs RAM, etc. The devs are not testing FreeNAS on small machines that I know of. It is hard enough to get everything working without artificially constraining things by requiring that it work right on small memory machines. The X86 build has been discontinued since it is impractical to deploy.

As Eric suggests, your experience is not unexpected. Sorry! It's almost 2015 and x86-64 stuff has been available for a dozen years. RAM prices have fallen and 8GB is no longer onerous. I respect that you want to recycle hardware - we do a lot of that here too - but FreeNAS isn't going to fit on it anymore. Sorry. It sucks, but, well, FreeNAS is worth it in the end.

 

[pschatz100]

I have noticed that newer versions of FreeNAS are less tolerant of older hardware, and not as forgiving when you use less than minimum recommended memory. I ran 8.3.1 for a very long time without issue. When I updated to version 9, I also upgraded my hardware. No problems.

Version 9.3 doesn't support 32 bit environment anymore, so don't even think about updating unless you upgrade your hardware.