Newbie with FreeNAS

[Jonay]

Hello everyone. My name is Jonay, and I'm a newbie with FreeNAS. I have a quite old HP laptop with two hard drives that I'm using for learning, and as soon as I learn enough, I'm building my own FreeNAS machine (I already have the chassis, PSU and a bunch of hard disks).

My goal is to learn as much as I can about FreeNAS, then install a machine to toy with (the laptop), then go for the full server, and once I have all set up and running, use it to store my media collection, pictures, etc., maybe using some jail to automate backups to this machine.

See you in the forums. Best regards,
Jonay

 

[Spearfoot]

Welcome to the forums, @Jonay!

It might be easier to install FreeNAS on your laptop as a virtual machine running under the free VirtualBox software. Many of us use this approach to experiment with FreeNAS before building servers. For one thing, it has the advantage of allowing you to configure a large number of small virtual disks to experiment with creating RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 arrays.

 

[Jonay]

Thanks a lot for your welcome message, Spearfoot. I tried your approach, but since the laptop is gathering dust, I like the idea of putting it to use. There are issues that can't be solved in virtual environments (like the proper BIOS setup, boot order, things like that). I want to manage first a easy setup, just two hard drives, get used to FreeNAS and its nuts and bolts, and then build my server, with enough know-how.

Maybe I'd use VirtualBox as a stop gap, between the laptop and the mini-server I'd build. Let's see.

Best regards,
Jonay

 

[SweetAndLow]

I doubt it will work on a laptop.

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