Old dell server as NAS?

[Justin Marzello]

I have an old Dell PowerEdge T610 that we just replaced and was wondering if it would make a decent FreeNAS box. It has 16GB of ram, 2 xeon cpus, dual gigabit nics, and upto 8 hot swap hard disks. My question is will this hardware work with FreeNAS and what kind of hard disk would you recommend? This will be to host backups and non-mission critical VMs, looking to get 6TB+ of usable disk space.

Thanks,
Justin

 

[cyberjock]

If you want to know if its supported you should look up all the hardware in your box, then compare it to the FreeBSD hardware support list.

Or, just install FreeNAS and see what happens. If you already have the hardware that's probably the easiest. If the hardware doesn't work its probably not supported. :P

 

[Justin Marzello]

And the hard drives?

 

[cyberjock]

Hard drives is very much a hot topic here. I use WD Greens. Many people use WD Reds(longer warranty and claimed to be designed just for small business NASes). This one is mostly a personal preference.