Former WHS user

[David26]

I used Windows Home Server back in the day, then switched to just having a Windows 10 media server.
Heard about FreeNAS in a different forum over a year ago and finally took the plunge, I have my FreeNAS server up and running for almost a month now.

Cyberjock's guide was really helpful and this community forum of course is too, I've been a lurker for a while. I did go with an AsRock Rack server board though so I could use it with a Ryzen CPU I already had, I know that Supermicro is mostly recommended.

Anyway, just wanted to say hello.

 

[Evertb1]

Welcome to the forum.

I have been a windows home server user myself. From the first version of WHS to WHS 2011. And then, after WHS was dropped, to Windows Server 2012 essentials. I am on FreeNAS since 2016. I must admit that I sometimes still miss some functions I had in WHS. But I was done with the never ending updates of Windows. And ZFS is superior to the filesystems that MS has to offer.

I think it's worth it to look at another platform then the proverbial combination of Intel/Supermicro. At the moment I am stilling running a FreeNAS server on that combo but at the end of this year or the first quarter of the coming year I will build a new server.

It's my intention to consolidate my ESXi homelab server, my FreeNAS home server and a handfull of other services into one ESXi server. FreeNAS will move to a VM. I have already a FreeNAS VM on my homelab and it works great.

I plan to build the new server with an Asrock Rack X470D4U2-2T motherboard and a Ryzen CPU. I have just build a new workstation with a Ryzen 7 3700x cpu and it looks very promissing. As soon as the Ryzen 4000 series are available my 3700x wil go to my new ESXi server while my new workstation gets a 4000 series CPU.

 

[David26]

I enjoyed reading your post Evertb1 thank you. I remember really liking the WHS 2011 dashboard and being able to pool all your storage, mind blowing for me at that time. But you're right ZFS is superior.

The Asrock Rack X470D4U2-2T seems to be a really good motherboard, here's a review of it if you haven't seen it. The Asrock Rack X470D4U2-2T and the one I have are the first two Ryzen server mobos. I went the Ryzen route mainly because I had the CPU already, a AMD Ryzen 5 3600X. I'm using a Ryzen 7 2700X as my desktop PC.

 

[Evertb1]

here's a review

Thanks for the link. But yes that review was one of the reasons that I started looking seriously at a Ryzen ASRock Rack combination.

 

[Ericloewe]

A lot of people here are refugees from WHS/WHS 2011. It's an odd mixture of gateway drug, abandonware and basic version of Windows Server with many of the same bells and whistles...

 

[Evertb1]

Yes WHS was a mixed bag. Very feature rich and full with possibilities but also buggy and always in need of the next update. Still, it opened me up to a whole new world of storage and services, far beyond the consumer NAS devices that were on the market at that time. I had a Serviio media server running on it and I liked that better then a Plex plug in on FreeNAS. And as a developer running an Oracle or SQL Server rdbms was not bad also. To me it still is a case of "what if". Fill in for yourself.