Keith Pratola
Dabbler
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2015
- Messages
- 12
I built a FreeNAS for home use. Primarily a VMware lab and will also be using CIFS to store about 3 TB of files. I am paranoid about data loss and have files going back to '97. I probably don't need to keep all those files, but hey, I like to hold on to stuff. I will be adding more to Dropbox, but my primary storage has also been some type of RAID setup in my house. With Windows I was never too worried since it was NTFS and if something happened to the OS partition, my data was still fine. I am not overly familiar with FreeBSD and how to still access my data if the OS becomes corrupt.
Recently at work we had FreeNAS installed on some older, not so great hardware, and it crashed. This was a VMware environment and everything was stored in a File extent and mounted via iSCSI. After the crash, I was never able to get FreeNAS to fully boot correctly and could no longer access or VMs or data. I plan on setting my FreeNAS up the same way for using iSCSI in addition to setting up CIFS for access in Windows.
I see many people install FreeNAS on a USB drive and have done the same, although I may switch to SSD. Two main questions are, with good hardware is there much risk of FreeNAS crashing? The other question, if something happens to the drive the OS is installed on, how easy is it to restore the configuration if you need to reinstall FreeNAS?
Recently at work we had FreeNAS installed on some older, not so great hardware, and it crashed. This was a VMware environment and everything was stored in a File extent and mounted via iSCSI. After the crash, I was never able to get FreeNAS to fully boot correctly and could no longer access or VMs or data. I plan on setting my FreeNAS up the same way for using iSCSI in addition to setting up CIFS for access in Windows.
I see many people install FreeNAS on a USB drive and have done the same, although I may switch to SSD. Two main questions are, with good hardware is there much risk of FreeNAS crashing? The other question, if something happens to the drive the OS is installed on, how easy is it to restore the configuration if you need to reinstall FreeNAS?