I currently have a single PC that has Windows server 2012R2 installed and acts primarily as a file server along with 2 Win7 machines running in Hyper-V. I'm wanting to move things around to separate out the file server and VM, thinking I can use FreeNAS and ESXi, on 2 separate boxes instead. The current system I have would remain as my ESXi box(i5-2500, 32GB RAM, Dual NIC), this machine fully works with ESXi as I ran it this way in the past.
I currently use StableBit DrivePool in Windows Server to allow me to bunch all of my various drives together. If one drive has bad sectors, starts to fail, acts weird...whatever, I'm only losing those files, or worse case, the data on that drive. This software also gives the option to backup select folders to multiple drives, which is what I am currently doing for my actual files that I care about. I also run crashplan, and backup the important data to an external USB drive.
For FreeNAS, I want to say first of all that majority of my data being stored is not critical. It would be an inconvenience if it was lost, but it would more or less just be a 'well..that sucks' feeling. This has not been an issue with my current setup which I've been using in various configurations over the past years.
I guess this rambled story gets me back to my question.. Could I add drives to FreeNAS individually, so that if something was to fail with the drive, memory(Non-ECC), etc, I would only lose the data on that drive, and not everything? I understand that FreeNAS is not created for this purpose, and it may be that my current way of doing things means I may be better off keeping a system on Windows and running the file share through there, as I currently am.
Thanks for any advice or suggestions you guys may have!
I currently use StableBit DrivePool in Windows Server to allow me to bunch all of my various drives together. If one drive has bad sectors, starts to fail, acts weird...whatever, I'm only losing those files, or worse case, the data on that drive. This software also gives the option to backup select folders to multiple drives, which is what I am currently doing for my actual files that I care about. I also run crashplan, and backup the important data to an external USB drive.
For FreeNAS, I want to say first of all that majority of my data being stored is not critical. It would be an inconvenience if it was lost, but it would more or less just be a 'well..that sucks' feeling. This has not been an issue with my current setup which I've been using in various configurations over the past years.
I guess this rambled story gets me back to my question.. Could I add drives to FreeNAS individually, so that if something was to fail with the drive, memory(Non-ECC), etc, I would only lose the data on that drive, and not everything? I understand that FreeNAS is not created for this purpose, and it may be that my current way of doing things means I may be better off keeping a system on Windows and running the file share through there, as I currently am.
Thanks for any advice or suggestions you guys may have!