Simple Set Up Guide?

[Diamond Dog]

There are numerous guides and there are so many features. Is there a simple guide for someone that just wants to serve files to his media streamer? Maybe an iTunes server and personal cloud?

I don't even need RAID and it seems like a lot of the complexity comes from setting up RAID?

I read the FREENAS Guide ppt in the sticky. I am not sure how many of those features I need?

8 GB of RAM is suggested, but do I need that for what I want to do?

A simplified guide for simple uses would be so appreciated. Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[cyberjock]

There really isn't a "simple setup guide". FreeNAS isn't all that simple. It's very powerful and versatile and its designed to allow you to either go simple or go all out if you are an advanced user and understand all the features FreeNAS offers. Some people consider FreeNAS as a whole to be extremely simple and everyone's definition of "simple" to be slightly different. The only advice I can recommend is to read the manual and the powerpoint(which you've already read) and do more reading and experimenting in a virtual machine before you start using real hardware and real data that you value.

And as always.. keep thorough backups.

 

[Diamond Dog]

is there a way to not use RAID and just use one drive for now and the ability to add a drive later for more storage (NO RAID). Is there a guide that shows me how to do this? And can I buy less RAM (4 GIGs) if I do this?

The reason I don't need RAID is I don't add to this HDD very often and once a month I copy everything to a HDD I keep in a safe deposit box, plus I have all the orginal copies of the Blu Rays. I also want to hook up my external USB 3.0 external drive and just just that as a backup drive in addition. I rather use the money for more storage when I need it in the future vs more backups that I already have back ups of.

 

[cyberjock]

The guides more of provide you with the knowledge on how to do various things and its up to you to take that knowledge and apply it for your situation as appropriate. There are so many possibe ways to setup FreeNAS that there is no one guide to fit all of the possible situations. It's up to you to read and understand everything for yourself.

You can choose to use one drive now and add more later, but there are limitations and whatnot with every choice that you should read up on from the manual and Google so you know what you are getting yourself into.