Newbie - NAS Recommendation

[JoelWeb]

The idea of building my own NAS is new to me, and I am a newbie at it. I want to recycle my old computer into a NAS for home use (mostly for file sharing, archiving and backup for me and my wife), but after reading all the comments here, I'm not sure FreeNAS is a good fit for my my limited hardware. It sounds like ZFS is too large and UFS is too small for my hardware. What I am looking for from the experts is; "How to make FreeNAS work with my hardware?" or "A recommendation for another version of NAS software that is a better fit for my limited resources"

My resources:

A old 2007 Dell XPS410 Dimension 9200 with 4 GB RAM
4 x 3 TB 7200 RPM Seagate drives OR 4 x 2 TB 7200 RPM Seagate drives
RAID 1

Due to funding restraints the only way I can upgrade to 8 GB RAM is to use 2 TB drives, but I'm not sure this is the way to go. I'd prefer the 3 TB drive storage capacity, if I can get them to work with the rest of my hardware resources.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

 

[cyberjock]

Well, the manual gives you the potential consequences of not using 8GB of RAM. There be sharks in the water.

If you think you're going to get validation to use 4GB of RAM, you are sorely mistaken. The guide is maintained by many people, and we make the same recommendations here that you'll find in the manual. So pardon me if i tell you to check out the hardware requirements warnings and decide for yourself. Don't be surprised if you come here with a problem and we tell you to upgrade to the minimum requirements before we help you further. We've been around enough to know that the 8GB of RAM wasn't just made up out of thin air.

 

[JoelWeb]

Well, the manual gives you the potential consequences of not using 8GB of RAM. There be sharks in the water.

If you think you're going to get validation to use 4GB of RAM, you are sorely mistaken. The guide is maintained by many people, and we make the same recommendations here that you'll find in the manual. So pardon me if i tell you to check out the hardware requirements warnings and decide for yourself. Don't be surprised if you come here with a problem and we tell you to upgrade to the minimum requirements before we help you further. We've been around enough to know that the 8GB of RAM wasn't just made up out of thin air.

cyberjock, since you are focused on the 8 GB of RAM requirement, you are only addressing part of my dilemma/question (ZFS). I don't need validation to use 4 GB of RAM with UFS. With UFS I have exceeded the minimum hardware requirements per the manual. If you still think my hardware is insufficient, do you have a recommendation for another NAS software package that requires less resources and still performs well?

 

[cyberjock]

You realize x86 and UFS are dead? No more FreeNAS releases will be x86 or support UFS. So why you'd want to build a system with that is a bit beyond me. Yes, I was wrong in my 8GB assessment since you are using UFS, I just don't acknowledge UFS any more since UFS is dead.

No, I can't recommend an alternative as I didn't even consider any alternatives when I chose to start using FreeNAS. I also am not a good point of contact to discuss any other OSes in any kind of experienced manner. For that you'd have to go to the forums for whatever alternative you are considering.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Well, the manual gives you the potential consequences of not using 8GB of RAM. There be sharks in the water.

And there's Badgers on land, so beware.

Cyberjock is right to point at UFS as being "dead technology" but I'd want to steer you towards ZFS simply for the fact that you said you'll be doing

file sharing, archiving and backup for me and my wife

Odds are good you've got pictures of you two dating, the wedding, and possibly down the road kids, who knows. That stuff is priceless. And ZFS, along with proper backups, will help you protect it. UFS can help, but it doesn't have the "self-healing" properties of ZFS, where silent corruption will get spotted on a scrub and corrected.

My suggestion - and I followed this advice myself - is to sell off the pieces that don't jive; in this case, the XPS410 and its low amount of non-ECC RAM. It's still a Core2 series, it's got a fancy case, you can probably find a younger gamer who's willing to drive a video card and a quad-core in it. With that money, pick up some secondhand parts that will fit the bill. Since your goal isn't performance, you can get away with the 8GB minimum (like I am) and then configure a 4-drive RAIDZ2 that will be able to sustain a two-drive failure and keep ticking.

Don't let the guard dog scare you off. ;)

 

[joelmusicman]

My suggestion - and I followed this advice myself - is to sell off the pieces that don't jive; in this case, the XPS410 and its low amount of non-ECC RAM. It's still a Core2 series, it's got a fancy case, you can probably find a younger gamer who's willing to drive a video card and a quad-core in it. With that money, pick up some secondhand parts that will fit the bill. Since your goal isn't performance, you can get away with the 8GB minimum (like I am) and then configure a 4-drive RAIDZ2 that will be able to sustain a two-drive failure and keep ticking.

Don't let the guard dog scare you off. ;)

Excellent advice (especially the last bit! :D)!

I think a lot of the trouble that the newbies get is that there are a metric ton of misinformed "guides" on the internet about what a great idea it is to cobble together old hardware and and throw FreeNAS on it. No mention of ECC, or minimum RAM, or the reasons why those things are important. Then they come here and get blasted when their system is woefully inadequate. Of course, there are also other OSes that use the ZFS filesystem but don't follow the ECC requirement that Sun Microsystems had when they introduced it, which compounds the problem.

There are definitely other NAS OSes that have lower requirements, but they (mostly) don't offer the data protection benefits of ZFS (when properly configured with ECC ram). If you use ZFS with bad non-ecc ram, it can actually do MORE damage than other OSes.

If you don't know what silent data corruption is: Everything looks fine, you can browse through your files and folders, then you open up your kid's toddler photos and they look like this...


So in short, you might be able use FreeNAS with your existing hardware, maybe as a media share for replaceable stuff, but if your memory goes bad (which is more common than people think!) it'll take your data with it.