I have an old box I'm hoping to re-purpose ; an Intel Core2Quad chip and four GB ram. I have used XP since I built it WAAAAYY back and added a PCI card to handle more hard disks ( total of 6 in the box now...2 on MoBo, 4 through PCI, all different sizes from 1 to 3 TB). When a disk gets full I hot swap, then use the full one on a dock if I need to see the old stuff.....but, I have HDs all over the place, and want to centralize the box as JBOD for my growing Lightroom Archive. I bought a 8GB thumb drive to boot from, attached it to the box, and now....here I sit. I downloaded the recommended Win32Diskimager and 7zip ( as well as the 32 bit FreeNAS software) to get the ball rolling, but am stuck. several questions though before I really make a mess....
1. is there any danger of data loss on the HDs in the stack? I will , of course, be writing to the Thumb Drive...
2. Should I disconnect all drives except the present OS drive ( for interface while I install the freeNAS) and then re-attach the drives once the web interface is up? CAN I re-attach the drives onto the FreeNAS interface? especially through the PCI card....
3. As my machine is presently running XP ( a 32 bit system...) CAN I use the 64 bit download?
4.Since I will ALWAYS use this as JBOD, do I really need the ZFS interface?
5. My business is all still images right now, but I will be doing more DSLR video archiving soon, and want to be able to offer the large files to other workstations as I hire editors...
6.This box is the only machine running a windows product in my office, and I have had no issues using built-in file sharing to store/write things to ALL drives from our Macs...FreeNAS will actually improve my experience, won't it?
Friends....I thank anyone...ANYONE...in advance for answering these questions and offering insight as to where I should be....I was just under the impression that adding a JBOD box to a network was far simpler than all this....and if I am able to do it with present hardware, well....YAY ME!
1. is there any danger of data loss on the HDs in the stack? I will , of course, be writing to the Thumb Drive...
2. Should I disconnect all drives except the present OS drive ( for interface while I install the freeNAS) and then re-attach the drives once the web interface is up? CAN I re-attach the drives onto the FreeNAS interface? especially through the PCI card....
3. As my machine is presently running XP ( a 32 bit system...) CAN I use the 64 bit download?
4.Since I will ALWAYS use this as JBOD, do I really need the ZFS interface?
5. My business is all still images right now, but I will be doing more DSLR video archiving soon, and want to be able to offer the large files to other workstations as I hire editors...
6.This box is the only machine running a windows product in my office, and I have had no issues using built-in file sharing to store/write things to ALL drives from our Macs...FreeNAS will actually improve my experience, won't it?
Friends....I thank anyone...ANYONE...in advance for answering these questions and offering insight as to where I should be....I was just under the impression that adding a JBOD box to a network was far simpler than all this....and if I am able to do it with present hardware, well....YAY ME!