First post, adding hard drives, new at all of this

[john1959]

Hi, I am bit lost here. I will try and give you the short version. I know windows fairly well and enough about other things to be dangerous. I know hardware extremely well but not programming. I have been a circuit board assembler and technician for 45 years.
I have a family member on assignment in Melbourne AU. I have thought about doing a nas server for a while now but know nothing about them until today. i had an older asus rig i built in 2012 collecting dust that was a perfect candidate for an experiment and have it running and i am at the first steps to configure drives and hit a brick wall.
The whole purpose of this setup is to manage the many drives i have here at home and run them on a system and also for her to be able to access and send files from her temp home in AU. I have about a dozen drives around here from 750gb up in various sizes and only 3 match but the other problem is they are all ntfs and all full. 1 is a 4tb external. I was hoping to be able to set them up as separate drives and i realize they would all be read only but wanted to set up a 1TB seagate motorized drive for her to send stuff back home, which is all i have available at this time that can be formatted. i also have a 64gb ssd that had the original OS on this computer which is also available to use here.

so i am at this volume manager window--considering this will be the only writable drive, or the two of them, I am trying to install this 1 tb and it don't necessarily need to be encrypted as most of what will be here are pix, some docs and odd media so to set this up as a 1tb private cloud so to speak, i need to set the volume layout. I am assuming that stripe would make it as if it was part of a raid array. it also says log cache and spare. considering what I am trying to do here what would be the best way to set this up at least temporarily to see if this will work? if it does I will add and build up an array later. right now i just want to see if this is feasible to do.

any help would be wonderful and I will be watching for a replay as i got nowhere in the mirc. i have the config window open waiting to do whatever is next. thanks in advance.

 

[pirateghost]

Considering what you are trying to do, FreeNAS isn't an appropriate fit.

Just use Windows and create a share with your data.

 

[john1959]

? I have no idea what that is or how to go about it although that sounds like something i was trying to do to start with. I thought there was a way to connect 2 windows computers to share files, problem is some of these will be very large files as we both work in media and deal with very large raw files from time to time. thats why i thought this would be a better option as i have tried some windows offerings and hit a brickwall a few times cause of file sizes and the amount of web traffic. the other option was to do something like a passworded ftp thing. Problem is I am not well versed in networking beyond a basic home network. Doing this today was both a challenge and a bit of a learning experience as i have encountered a lot of things i have never seen. the thing is . i am going to be maintaining and sending terrabytes (yes plural) of files. she will most likely be sending back modified files but nowhere near that volume. thats why i though having this located here would be the best thing. this is too much for most of the cloud services i have looked at for the cost it involves. that much cloud space would cost me hundreds per month and that is not do-able.

Since my post i have gone ahead and set that drive up and actually installed this on the ssd and added the 1tb drive-- theres no data here in the system at the moment so there was nothing to lose. I saw and have read things in this forum and also on the web about usb lifespans with freenas which is why i decided to use the ssd. all in all i have 8 sata ports still available and a couple pcie cards that would go beyond that for drives if i can actually make this do what i am trying to do with it-doing an array is definitely a longer term plan but this close to christmas the budget's not there right now.- right now i am trying to test and see if this will work.

but the thing that always gets me is whenever i end up trying to do something beyond windows capacity it always involves things like programming languages, command line and a lot of things the average computer (windows) user knows nothing about. from a hardware standpoint I can build anything and i have a fully staffed and equipped pcb design and assembly facility at my disposal to do that. we build and create thousands of pcbs for various companies daily. from a programming point of view to me linux mint is a challenge and please dont laugh although i know you will.

I am going to plow ahead for the time being and see what can be done-- basically if she can access a 10 to 20 gb raw file from this thing and successfully sync/download it at her end then this will work fine, in the meantime i am surfing yet another learning curve, thanks for your reply, i will be watching.

 

[pirateghost]

You don't need FreeNAS to have a Windows share.

The fact that windows can access shares is attributed to the fact that it's a built in function of Windows.

Using a single disk in FreeNAS for storage is ignoring the one thing that makes FreeNAS FreeNAS.

Take your Windows machine. Right click on a folder. Properties. Sharing tab. Share this folder.

From another computer, you go-to Windows explorer, type in \\ip.address.of.othermachine\sharename

Bam. You have a Windows share. Literally the same exact thing the Windows share does in FreeNAS, and you don't have to worry about having a bunch of unsupported disks (all those NTFS disks with data on them, which can't be used in FreeNAS). You can use them in your Windows machine.

Nothing about your setup says that you are needing a NAS.

 

[Deleted47050]

Hi and welcome :) I must say that I agree with what @pirateghost said here, in that I don't think you need something as complex as FreeNAS in your scenario. However, there are several things I would like to mention after reading your second message that I think it's worth pointing out before you decide to use FreeNAS anyway.

? I have no idea what that is or how to go about it although that sounds like something i was trying to do to start with. I thought there was a way to connect 2 windows computers to share files, problem is some of these will be very large files as we both work in media and deal with very large raw files from time to time. thats why i thought this would be a better option as i have tried some windows offerings and hit a brickwall a few times cause of file sizes and the amount of web traffic.

The thing is, you might definitely get higher performance from a RAID in FreeNAS, but your bottleneck here will most definitely be your network speed. It will still be slow as hell downloading and uploading TBs of data over the Internet. Sure, you are going to get higher performance from a RAID once all data has been downloaded, but depending on what you need to do with that data, you could even forget about RAID.

the other option was to do something like a passworded ftp thing. Problem is I am not well versed in networking beyond a basic home network.

Here is a very important point imho. What you are looking to do is more of a networking thing than a storage thing. Things like these should be done only if you are experienced and know what you are doing, especially looking at the security risks involved in opening any kind of door to your internal network. You can't just configure this and be done with it, it needs to be done properly. There are network concepts to keep in mind, firewalling to consider, it's not as simple as you might think.

If you don't feel comfortable doing this, I would suggest hiring a professional.

Since my post i have gone ahead and set that drive up and actually installed this on the ssd and added the 1tb drive-- theres no data here in the system at the moment so there was nothing to lose. I saw and have read things in this forum and also on the web about usb lifespans with freenas which is why i decided to use the ssd.

Yes, USB drives tend to have shorter lifespans, but keep in mind that using a SSD as a boot drive for FreeNAS is definitely a waste of space, as you cannot use that device for additional data storage. Once loaded, most of the operations run from RAM, so I wouldn't worry about that. You can even configure failover USB boot disks so even if one fails, you would start using the other one automatically.

I pretty much exclusively use USB thumb drives or SD cards as my server boot disks and have never had to worry about that too much. If I had a SSD to spare, I would much rather use it as cache (if it brought any improvements to my specific usage, which they wouldn't, as of right now).

but the thing that always gets me is whenever i end up trying to do something beyond windows capacity it always involves things like programming languages, command line and a lot of things the average computer (windows) user knows nothing about.from a hardware standpoint I can build anything and i have a fully staffed and equipped pcb design and assembly facility at my disposal to do that. we build and create thousands of pcbs for various companies daily. from a programming point of view to me linux mint is a challenge and please dont laugh although i know you will.

I don't mean to sound rude, but if you don't know how to do something, you either learn it or you pay somebody to do it. The average Windows user doesn't know anything about the command line, which is absolutlely fine. But if this average user decides to do something that requires the command line, it's not a problem of the thing that he is trying to do, it's the user himself that is. Either he learns, or he forgets about the project.

Not everything is meant to be done by everybody. Especially in IT, you cannot be a master of everything. Some things are better left to more experienced people, unless you want to put in some serious effort to become proficient with something.

I am going to plow ahead for the time being and see what can be done-- basically if she can access a 10 to 20 gb raw file from this thing and successfully sync/download it at her end then this will work fine, in the meantime i am surfing yet another learning curve, thanks for your reply, i will be watching.

I would recommend you keep playing with your FreeNAS box locally, to see if it's something you enjoy and that you might find a use for. But honestly, I would just go with a Windows share for your specific project, you don't need added complexity for what you are looking to do, and this will leave you enough time to learn the networking concepts that you need to get this to work ;)