A Few Questions RE: 1st time experience w/ FREENAS

[Millay4IU]

I attempted to run one of the later versions of FREENAS, I think 8.(x) whatever. I was attempting to run on a DELL DEM 2400 P4/ 2GB/RAM. I believe the image download didn't play nice with the hardware it was trying to read. I keep seeing WARNINGS and ERRORS during the load sequence. I didn't know how much of it was actually critical or could I ignore it? I then saw one final message prior to download completion and that was something to the effect that 512KB minimum FREENAS will be unstable and likely to cause errors. Well I'm not sure where the system is seeing 512KB because the ATX board that is in there has 2 RAM slots, each slot as a 1GB DDR stick. My only theory is that the 1GB DDR sticks (x2 ) are corrupt or bad and the program is only able to muster up a small amount of memory? Is it safe to say that the computer too old and out dated to be compatible with FREENAS? I will try a newer tower. Furthermore, I did finally get into the URL and play around with the GUI. I saw both of the IDE hard drives that were in the DELL tower. If FREENAS ran the operating system install properly it would have occupied one of the volumes with the OPERATING SYSTEM, so I should not have saw 2 drives right? I also notice that when I removed the SANDISK flash stick after the install that FREENAS didn't like that. It's almost like the install isn't going through and the Free NAS OS is sitting on the SANDSK Card? I would suspect that once FREENAS is installed i could removed the storage medium containing the install image right? Any comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

[Nindustries]

Honestly, it all doesnt matter because youre risking your data anyway because you are using less than 6Gig memory..

Read the requirements.

- Sent from mobile.

 

[Millay4IU]

ok, thanks for the feedback. I'm more less wasting my time if I try run the install image in any hardware set up containing less the 6GB of RAM?

 

[Nindustries]

ok, thanks for the feedback. I'm more less wasting my time if I try run the install image in any hardware set up containing less the 6GB of RAM?

You could use UFS instead of ZFS, but that kinda defeats the purpose of FreeNAS.
I'm not saying it won't work, i'm just saying your data could be at risk. I just noticed the manual recommends 8 gigabyte of memory.
If you can't afford a decent amount of memory, i'm afraid ZFS is not fit for you.;)

Greetings

 

[cmfisher4]

Actually, FreeNAS runs on your USB stick unless you "force" it onto a hard disk. But, if you do that, you lose the entirety of the disk to only the FreeNAS OS and it cannot be used for data storage.
I have been studying for MONTHS (literally) on how to use this system and I only last night ordered the final piece of my puzzle. I intend to run it in parallel with my current server for another month or two until I fully understand how it works.
Frankly, and I don't mean to offend, but if you have not done the due diligence on your own on these forums or by reading the documents to have figured out that the system you are trying to install it on is woefully inadequate and that and a USB stick is (mostly) required for a properly configured system, then you are setting yourself up to lose all the data that you may eventually be (un)lucky enough to get on your pool.

 

[ZFS Noob]

Take a look at NAS4Free and see if it's a better fit for your hardware. If you don't need the additional features that FreeNAS offers, then that might be just the ticket.