Ghetto FreeNAS server?

sco0by · 3 Nov 2018 at 11:32

Morning all,

I'm thinking about using a load of spares I have lying around to build a FreeNAS server.

Few questions:

It's going to be built around an old Dell XPS motherboard, is FreeNAS particularly picky about chipsets etc?

Is FreeNAS happy with SATA/USB drives being used to build the array?

Will 8gb RAM be enough for general usage?

Any advice/suggestions gratefully received

Avalon · 3 Nov 2018 at 11:45

https://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

That answers pretty much all of your questions clearly and concisely, USB is a bad idea in general for actual storage rather than boot. Personally i'd suggest UnRAID over FreeNAS as its VM/docker support is in a different league.

sco0by · 3 Nov 2018 at 11:55

Thanks I did read the specs but was more after real-world experiences.

The XPS mobo might be a non-starter anyway as I just tried booting it with an old PERC310 RAID card and it refused to even post.

UnRAID looks interesting but I don't need the ability to run VM's and it's not free. The plan is to spend zero money

Avalon · 3 Nov 2018 at 14:00

I've run a trial licence (on top of my two paid Pro licences) for 6+ months, unless you reboot, it still works as before. What exactly do you want your NAS to do? I ask as the days of a dumb NAS are largely behind us, it's rare people just want a NAS to be a NAS.

Snapshot · 4 Nov 2018 at 07:19

Look at XigmaNAS as an alternative to FreeNAS. It's an on-going development of what FreeNAS was before it was taken over.

MassiveJim · 19 Nov 2018 at 15:33

Snapshot said:
Look at XigmaNAS as an alternative to FreeNAS. It's an on-going development of what FreeNAS was before it was taken over.

Rather its the ongoing development of the original FreeNAS after someone else trademarked the name and forced them to change theirs.

I was under the impression that FreeNAS and XigmaNAS were 2 completely separate OS, related only by the fact they both run on FreeBSD

Snapshot · 21 Nov 2018 at 10:07

They are now. FreeNAS was taken over and became a much more commercial product. The original code base became NAS4Free which was renamed to XigmaNAS earlier this year. There were copyright problems with NAS4Free which prompted the name change.

MassiveJim · 21 Nov 2018 at 17:06

The way you have written it makes it sound as though someone broke off from the original FreeNAS project and re-wrote the code to produce a new OS.

Whereas I was under the impression that the existing FreeNAS and the original FreeNAS (Now XigmaNAS) were never anything to do with each other, rather than the "owners" of the current FreeNAS essentially trademarked the name and stole it from what is now XigmaNAS

Snapshot · 26 Nov 2018 at 08:53

I'm not sure how you read that from what I wrote. The current FreeNAS is certainly a complete re-write but XigmasNAS may still have some code from the original project. The way you describe what happened is much more adversarial than this Wikipedia article suggests.

MassiveJim · 28 Nov 2018 at 15:25

Snapshot said:
I'm not sure how you read that from what I wrote. The current FreeNAS is certainly a complete re-write but XigmasNAS may still have some code from the original project. The way you describe what happened is much more adversarial than this Wikipedia article suggests.

I stand corrected.
Thanks for clearing that up, I suppose if i had spent 30 seconds googling it myself I could have found out myself that I was wrong