Running with FreeNAS 8

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I finally took stock of the old computer parts I had sitting in my basement office this past week and decided that maybe I should just throw together a box and see if FreeNAS 8 would work for my needs.

So this is the box I have running FreeNAS at the moment:

  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor
  • ASUS M2A-VM motherboard
  • 1 GB DDR2 RAM
  • 80 GB Western Digital hard drive (for FreeNAS)
  • 250 GB Western Digital hard drive (for storage)

So far, it works really well. I’m having some issues with the machine not booting properly every time, but I think that it might be a bad stick of RAM or some other issues. I have a single ZFS volume setup on the 250 GB drive with a single ZFS dataset being used for Time Machine backups from my wife’s MacBook.

I’m going to run with this for a little while and see if it fits my needs. Next thing is to find another drive to use for just generic storage and see if that will work well. I also need to transfer it over to my gigabit switch so that I’m not being limited by the 10/100 switch I have on my workbench.

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  • http://apatheticthursday.net/ MrBobDobolina

    +1 for FreeNAS, though I really want a FreeNAS running Crash Plan for my ultimate backup utility

    • http://bobmartens.net/ Bob Martens

      Now THAT would be interesting to see.

  • Anonymous

    Very cool. Having seen the performance of the Synology hardware I think I’m going that route when drive prices come down out of the stratosphere.

    • http://bobmartens.net/ Bob Martens

      I know what you mean. I’m pretty much repurposing every SATA drive I have in my basement as temporary storage until the 2 TB drives fall under $100 again.

      Those were the days.

      One thing I AM going to do is get some more RAM for the box. You need at least 4 GB to enable pre-fetching and increase the performance even more. More RAM, more performance. Makes sense, right?