Zredwire
Explorer
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2017
- Messages
- 85
I am gonna start with an existing pc just to "play" and learn some basic stuff and how FN works, before proceeding on buying/building a purpose machine.
I am also new to FreeNAS and this is exactly what I did. I took a test PC and ran FreeNAS on it for two months while learning about the system. After running in test I had a much better understanding of what hardware I needed (though I started to purchase items after a couple of weeks and ended up with a production system that has little room for expansion as my needs changed as I learned more about the system). FreeNAS can do so many things that you don't know what you don't know until you try it out. Snapshots are one example. Anyway I only use my system for storage and do not run any programs on it. I learned FreeNAS in this order:
vdevs
Pool (or Volume) - I think they are the same thing, someone can correct me if not.
Dataset and Zvol
Sharing
Serices (services that affect sharing)
Permissions
Boot Disk
Snapshots
Scrubs
S.M.A.R.T task
Email notifications
Networking and LAG
Config Backups
SLOG and L2ARC
I am sure I am missing something but you get the idea. Don't have to learn it all at once. Once you get a share going it is usable (for testing). Even things like network can wait as you set up basic networking when installing. Advanced things can wait until you have time. At first Youtube videos really helped me get started. After that the guides in the forum, the manual, and various blogs found from google searches helped me understand some of the advanced stuff (I still have a lot to learn). Anyway you could really learn all this in a few days if you have the time. I spread it over a couple of months as I don't have a lot of time per day to devote to it. Either way I would really encourage you to learn FreeNAS well if you are going to use it at your business. If you don't want to learn it an all in one NAS package may be better (though any product will have some learning curve).
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