[Valkyrie743]

hey all. I'm currently planning on building my first file server/nas system and i have no idea where to start. I currently have all my media files on a external usb 3.0 drive (2tb) and its getting full. and i have other media devices in the house that i want to be able to stream. currently i have Openelec install on my HTPC and i don't want to have my HTPC to act as a file server as well.

i was reading about freenas and thought i would give that a try but i have no idea if i should use that or not. i was kinda lost when read how to use it. I just want to be able to access my files anytime without having to worry if the computer the files are on is turned on. also i dont know if i should look into raid or not. only raid i have done in the past was raid 0 and 1 on a gaming rig a while back. not sure if i should look into raid for file protection being that i plan on building a server with 4+ HDD's. TBH i was just going to make a computer and load windows 7 and just share all the drives though SMB but thought i would ask you guys what would be the best choice.

also would like to know how much hardware power do i need? i was thinking about using my HTPC's I3 2100 cpu and get a Ivy bridge cpu for my htpc but idk if thats overkill. should i look into a sandy bridge pentium? ( I like staying with Intel being how fast they are and how little power they use. not sure how much ram i would need. i was thinking 2gb's but being how ram is mad cheap i could get a 4gb set under 40 bucks (hell my 8 gb set in my gaming cost me 50 bucks)

what do you guys think?


i also would like to try to make a SFF nas/server but dont mind building a small tower.

i was looking at this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6859107052
was just going to buy this but idk. plus i would be stuck with only 4 drive's

[eskro]

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=104489

[Valkyrie743]

i took a look at that but wanted to see what people think about freenas and how much ram i need minimum

[Kirky99]

FLexRAID under Win7 works nice. Never tried freenas. I don't remember too many people using freenas here, it's usually unRAID with a sprinkle of FlexRAID users here or there. Many Synology devices as well.

[eskro]

agree, not many FreeNAS users to my knowledge in here.
most use unRAID as it reigns supreme

[thethirdnut]

FreeNAS is a very good option.

Other word of advice I'd give is don't go for a small case if you don't have to...give yourself upgrade and expansion options down the road.

[xbmcg]

freeNAS is great. I Use it fo business purposes with zfs raid1. Very powerfull and feature-rich.

There are 2 freeNAS project out there. freeNAS 8 (commercial product, ok, polished UI, but not the latest & greatest) and the community project legacy freeNAS 7 (version 9 beta) with much more options and more recent os / zfs version - but more old-fashioned UI.

There are more zfs based open source projects, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, EOS NAS etc...

If you are looking for massive storage with high reliability / redundancy / automatic snapshots / remote replication / raid 1, 5, 6, 10, ... tipple parity... + various cache options (SSD as ZIL and / or L2ARC cache), deduplication etc. - this is the right solution. zfs file system is used in high-availability - massive data storage solutions for filer / databases by oracle and large internet companies with hundreds of disks). Beside the classic protocols (nfs, smb, ftp, apple talk) it supports iSCSI so you can use it as storage system for windows / linux cluster server solutions. It supports link aggregation of your network interface cards, so you can have more than just 1 Gbps throughput when configured properly (mirrored disk stripes, L2ARC, many parallel clients)

If you do not use all fancy features - you do not need much RAM, freeNAS 7 / freeNAS 8 can run in RAID1 config on a 2G RAM easily. If you use raidz (parity, or double / tripple parity) you will need more ram / cpu. The more RAM, the faster (all available ram is used to cache the directory structures + data) on a heavi-duty multi-user environment it is a good idea to add more RAM. With no deduplication they recommend 1G RAM per TB data. However - this is for heavi RW-traffic. If you think about media storage - it is almost read-only sequential access of large data chunks - so no problems with much less RAM.