Running FreeNAS and Windows 10 on the same PC

BullHorn

Cadet
Joined
Jan 24, 2020
Messages
2
I have a gaming PC that's on 24/7 and is built in a Full Tower, so it has room for 8 hard drives. I would like to use this PC for general usage and gaming, but also run my Plex server off of, and keep my harddrives inside it.

I found a guide that explains how to do this by installing FreeNAS inside a VirtualBox VM. I would like to know what the dangers/limitations/downsides of this are, and is there a better way to achieve my goal?
 

BullHorn

Cadet
Joined
Jan 24, 2020
Messages
2
Could you suggest another redundancy option for me? It's a shame having a case with so many drives in it, but being completely incapable of having redundancy.

On my old computer I used to run RAID1 with Intel RST but because I'm on AMD now, I'm forced to use Windows 10 built-in "Storage Spaces" feature, and coincidence or not, I had a drive failure within less than a week...
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
There's basically two relatively low-drama ways to go in my opinion.

This assumes that just piling all the storage into your Windows PC is unappealing.

One is to acquire a QNAP, Synology, or other desktop NAS unit, which you stick your storage in, configure it, making sure to do things like e-mail and push notifications so you're like - y'know - notified of problems, and go on your merry way. This isn't tragic but does have some vendor lock-in associated with it.

The other is something like setting up a FreeNAS system. There are a number of hardware platforms out there that will work fine for this. Unfortunately, despite the name, none of them are Free and generally the FreeNAS path will be more expensive than an entry level QNAP/Syno. Also, while many people try, it's not a good idea to pick random hardware and then try to make it work with FreeNAS. The process is better driven by picking from what's known to work with FreeNAS.

There are other options that will make this work, directly on your PC, such as picking up an LSI RAID controller card. You can definitely get a card like the LSI 9270CV-8i, which can be found fairly easily on eBay at a low price ($99 here) which will happily allow you to create a RAID volume directly on your system. However, there are some bumps and downs associated with this.
 
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