Poverty Spec Build (FreeNAS 9.10.2-U6)

[Trojan Hussar]

Back in 2017 an old Acer Altos EasyStore NAS I'd been using for years died and I hastily put together a FreeNAS box to reuse the drives. I dropped all the drives into an el-cheapo 3U server case with an ancient Gigabyte motherboard and a couple of sticks of RAM I found in a drawer, pushed it into the cabinet and it has run flawlessly for two years until recently the system case started wailing an overheat warning due to two dead fans. At this point I powered it down and left it to one side on my 'to-do' list.

Now I've come to revive it I thought it might be time to upgrade FreeNAS 9.10 to something newer and I consulted the minimum hardware specs and came across some rather scathing threads from people suggesting low-end hardware and realised that I was running W-A-Y below even the modest specifications these people were suggesting. I'd also committed the heinous crime of running the four drives on an Adaptec 5405 RAID card. So I backed up all the data to a spare drive I had and put the drives back onto the mainboard SATA connectors and let it run with FreeNAS 9.10.2 again. Reconfigured the storage on SATA and it all appears to work as before.

So whilst I don't recommend this as a build, I submit this as a machine which has been running 24/7/365 for 2 years without a hiccup. Data stored is largely non-essential MP3's, Movies and ISO images, so nothing that couldn't be downloaded again if it went up in smoke.

AMD Athlon X2 4450e 2.3GHz
Gigabyte GA-MA78LM-S2H (Rev1.0)
4Gb Kingston Value DDR2-800
4 x Samsung SpinPoint F2 1.5Tb 5400rpm SATA2

I've just repopulated the shares and got 63Mb/sec writes to this machine with 50-60% CPU usage . I'm awaiting some new fans and a thermostatic controller then it'll go back into the rack. FreeNAS is great and I look forward to building a slightly more compliant spec machine in the near future but this poverty spec machine has proved an excellent platform for my family for the past couple of years.

Regards,
TH.

 

[Yorick]

I think the “8GiB RAM minimum” recommendation came out of too much time spent trying to support people who just plain ran out of RAM and then complained. It’s setting expectations - you can run under spec, you won’t get a lot of support.

Ditto for the recommendation for ECC RAM and not using RAID controllers: Going against those recommendations has caused people data loss. It doesn’t mean you will lose your data, just that in rather specific cases it becomes more likely.

You clearly know your risk and alleviate it. Makes a lot of sense to me