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.
5 replies on “Running with FreeNAS 8”
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.
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?
+1 for FreeNAS, though I really want a FreeNAS running Crash Plan for my ultimate backup utility
Now THAT would be interesting to see.