FreeNAS on an old laptop

Nuclear Fusion · 29 Jun 2014 at 12:12

Hi all, I'm considering building a cheap FreeNAS system with an old laptop we have. It is a Windows Vista Sony laptop with 3Gb of RAM and a Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz I believe. The video card is faulty and produces blue streaks down the screen so it is currently sitting in a cupboard with no use for it, however I thought since it would be a headless server it would actually have some use now. Does anyone have any experience with using a laptop for a NAS? What would be the best way to connect multiple HDDs?

Steveocee · 29 Jun 2014 at 18:32

You'll get limited with the HDDs as USB isn't incredibly fast but a valid use for an old machine either way.

Nuclear Fusion · 29 Jun 2014 at 18:35

Yeah that was one thing I am worried about as they'll be USB 2.0 (given age of the laptop). I was thinking I could replace the HDD currently in there with a larger one and get another to replace the optical drive, other than that I think I'm probably limited to USB

Uhtred · 29 Jun 2014 at 19:13

Freenas is actually quite demanding, especially if you want to use ZFS and I really wouldn't fancy using hard drives over USB.

You wouldn't be able to use RAIDZ because if you knock one cable you lose a drive or two and pop goes your drive pool.

You might get away with UFS but, as above it's not going to be quick over USB

Steveocee · 30 Jun 2014 at 09:21

You're not limited to Freenas though......
You could run some kind of Linux server (ubuntu for example) for file shares or even at a push, strip back a Windows install! You may even be able to force Xpenology onto it.

ASE001 · 30 Jun 2014 at 09:44

If you want to use it as a backup only device, with one or two maybe three usb storage devices then it will be fine. Setup Rsync on the NAS and install Deltacopy on your windows devices. Then you can leave it switched on in the background regularly backing up your devices, I've setup mine to backup MyDocs folder ever hour. There should be a linux version of Deltacopy out there too, maybe tablet one too?

To get resilience without RAIDing, you could get Rsync to backup to alternate USD storage devices each time it runs. Expand on this and you could have the ability to regress your data by the Rsynce period times the number of USB storage devices. ie. 3 USB storage devices, sync period of 1 day, means to could regress three days. Useful if you edit something and decide you want to start again, then you could restore it from one of the previous days backups.

Rsync only copies changes (delta) so shouldn't max out your USB drives, if it does then just make the Rsync period larger to allow time for Rsync to finish its current cycle.

Laptops should be good fit for this scenario since they tend to have good power saving features, since most of the time it will be sitting there idle!

PS I use NAS4FREE and it works a treat

M3G4UK · 30 Jun 2014 at 14:23

Laptop drive connectors can be adapted to fit full size desktop drives. You can get MiniPCIe cards that can run full size PCIe RAID cards, or, tiny MiniPCIe SATA controllers - take a look on ebay. That way you can run full size desktop drives. Not desperately elegant but if it's in a cupboard... not such an issue.

Thinking about it, you could use a Mini PCIe to eSATA converter and get an eSATA enclosure...

Nuclear Fusion · 30 Jun 2014 at 15:28

Thanks for the replies everyone, I've tried using FreeNAS but keep getting a RAM parity error, both when installing from a flash drive and from a DVD

Any ideas or is it just a case of corrupt RAM?

EDIT: Thanks for the heads up about NAS4FREE, I installed the embedded version from a flash drive onto another and I can now access the server through the web interface. I'm thinking of getting an optical bay adapter and replacing the HDD in there and getting a pair of 2.5" HDDs and putting them in RAID 1. What 2.5" HDDs would people recommend for this use?