What are my limitations running an old Dell PowerVault 745n (32-bit) NAS

[Ken Nalbone]

Hello,
I have recently come into possession of a Dell PowerVault 745n. This is basically a 1U Poweredge 750 with a locked down bios. I have flashed the bios to 750 and I am able to boot off a USB key. I would like to try running FreeNAS on this for personal use at home. Performance wise I would basically just like to use this to stream HD movies to a console or PC elsewhere in the house. Gigabit ethernet will be used.

My main question is, due to the fact that that is a 32-bit machine with a 2.8Ghz P4, what will be my limitations performance wise? I know that I can only use 4GB of RAM at the most so I assume that I will be running UFS. The SATA controller in this server is not a RAID controller so I would have tu use software RAID.

Will the size of the drives/array that I have in the box affect speed? There are 4 slots currently occupied by 4x250 GB drives, but I would like to fill those with something bigger if possible. Can I reasonably expect a decent performing home NAS out of this hardware? Would turning on iSCSI impact performance as well?

 

[cyberjock]

The more stuff you use, the slower the system will perform.

Its so hard to determine if some given configuration will provide "decent" speed (not to mention how arbitrary "decent" is) that you should just try it.

Newer hard drives typically have faster data transfer rates, so the server may be a little faster with bigger/newer drives.

 

[Ken Nalbone]

Thanks cyberjock,
By the more "stuff" I use are you talking about the amount of features I decided to turn on in FreeNAS? Does the size of the array affect the speed of the NAS? Is there some point at which I just can't add space due to a limitation of UFS, 32-bit OS, or some other reason? I'm not goin overkill so I probably won't be buying 4TB drives, but would probably like to have 4 1-2TB drives in there. Yes "decent" is a very arbitrary term to use, but I don't know how else to put it. There will rarely ever be more than one user accessing the NAS at a time and I will be performing more reads to (listening to music, watching videos, etc.) than writes (saving newly purchased media).