A FreeNAS PC for Testing

[Ruff.Hi]

I have a FreeNAS computer in the basement (see sig). It is fine and has been working for over three years. The latest system upgrades trashed my shares (a little) so I thought I might throw a PC together for a) testing, b) testing upgrades, c) HDD burn-ins and d) because I can. I don't care about data integrity on this machine.

Now - do I need to follow the hardware guide if I am just using a machine for the above purposes? Will any ol' motherboard work? Do I really need ECC memory?

 

[tfran1990]

I would say no on the ecc, but its best to have at least 8G
You will still want to have an intel NIC tho(very few realtek work)
As for doing the burn tests for drives going into production, i would still follow the HBA rule(correct FW) and avoid marvil oboard sata controllers.

 

[Ruff.Hi]

I would say no on the ecc, but its best to have at least 8G

Thanks for the reply. I should be able to string 8G together.

You will still want to have an intel NIC tho(very few realtek work)

Noted.

As for doing the burn tests for drives going into production, i would still follow the HBA rule(correct FW) and avoid marvil oboard sata controllers.

I will be using mobo sata connections.

 

[Redcoat]

Now - do I need to follow the hardware guide if I am just using a machine for the above purposes? Will any ol' motherboard work? Do I really need ECC memory?

a) testing, b) testing upgrades, c) HDD burn-ins and d) because I can.

a) testing - depends what you are testing and with what degree of rigor
b) testing upgrades - see a) above
c) HDD burn ins - no
d) because I can - ?

 

[Chris Moore]

If you are not relying on the system for data integrity, you have a lot more flexibility. Do you already have hardware you are considering for this?

 

[Ruff.Hi]

Do you already have hardware you are considering for this?

I do. I collection of mobo, ram sticks and SSDs. I will dig them out and list them.

 

[John Doe]

just my thoughts:
In case my productive environment is so important, to verify upgrades, I would run them on exactly the same hardware. Just to make sure it will really work.

in case it is just for playing around, go with whatever hardware is available. my first build was an asrock board non ecc, realtek nic and rubbish cpu.
it worked somehow and gave me confidence to dig deeper into freenas and later into esxi.