Possible NAS box...?

[Dave Burton]

Hi folks,

I've recently acquired an ITX-ish sized PC that I was thinking about re-purposing to a NAS box. The specs are as follows:

• Processor: AMD Athlon X2 7450 2.40GHz

• Memory: 4GB RAM (Not sure if I'd need to up this, if possible...)

• Hard Drive: none (I have several options available)

• Optical Drive: none (as above)

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

• User Interface: 2 USB, Headphone, Microphone,HDMI, VGA

• Graphics Controller: nVidia Geforce 8200, HDMI port on-board

Do you think this would be good enough to run a simple FreeNAS unit, or would I be needing something better? I know I'd need to probably add USB3.1 which I can do easily (electronics engineer/cable magician) but other than this do you think it'd be capable??

Cheers for any advice!!

 

[bremen1874]

It's going to depend on what you want to use it for.

Hardware requirements are here http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

It used to be something you could throw onto redundant hardware. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore.

Have a look at unRAID as well. I'm pretty sure the hardware requirements are lower. It isn't free, but it's relatively cheap and you can trial it for quite a while.

 

[Dave Burton]

Bah!! I think the 64bit requirement of FreeNAS might kill this before it gets going, so I'll look at the unRAID option to see if it's viable, thank you for your help

Edit: looks like unRAID needs an x64 platform too, oh well :/

Second edit: The cpu is an Athlon ii X3 425, which according to research is 64 bit capable, so looks like it might be doable. Gonna push ahead, and see what I can manage