Best Solution

[Tofugopher]

I am putting together a FreeNas server with pieces from some old machines, here are the specs.

AMD ATHLON II x2 2.7 GHZ
ECS BLACK SERIES A790GXM-AD3
(2x2) 4GB DDR3 1333 Ram
an old case I have
400W power supply

I really do not have a lot of money to spend on this and I have a spare 1 tb HD. I am going to use this server for torrents, and for a media server at home, and that is it. My question is, would it be best to buy 3 more 1 TB HD and get 4 more GB of ram to run ZFS, or should I just get 2x3TB HD and run a simple RAID 1 UFS. The cost is about the same, but the 2x3 TB will give me a little more space. I do not know if I will need to exapand in the future.

Thank you for your help!

Brian

 

[anodos]

You have desktop parts (non-ECC RAM). UFS support is going away. You might be better served with a different OS.

 

[cyberjock]

You have desktop parts (non-ECC RAM). UFS support is going away. You might be better served with a different OS.

+1

Go find a more suitable OS for your situation or be ready to spend money. Considering the first sentence you had was "I really don't have a lot of money..." I think we've narrowed it down for you.

 

[Tofugopher]

What other OS would you think I should use?

Also, hypothetically...If I were to use this system but replace the ram with 8 GB of ECC ram what would the answer be? I would need to buy more ram anyway for a proper ZFS set-up and it really wouldn't be that much more for me to get 8 instead of 4 and just not use the ram I currently have. If I purchased 8 GB of new ram, and purchased 3x1 tb hd would that be an ok set up for a media server / bit torrent machine. (if it helps I have a 2 TB hard drive right now and it is just over half full)

 

[Tofugopher]

+1

Go find a more suitable OS for your situation or be ready to spend money. Considering the first sentence you had was "I really don't have a lot of money..." I think we've narrowed it down for you.

If the only thing keeping me from using FreeNas is $50 for a little more ram, I think I can do it. I am just looking for the most cost effective way to run the program.

 

[krikboh]

Your system does not support ECC RAM so you would need to replace the mobo/CPU also.

 

[Whattteva]

Look into SME server or Zentyal Linux. They should probably serve your purpose pretty well. I think they have most of what FreeNAS offers and some more. No ZFS, but they do have their own RAID implementation. Not that you would want to run ZFS with that low amount of RAM to begin with.

 

[anodos]

Personally the only Linux distro I'll use in production is red hat or centos 6.x. Unfortunately, setting it up will take a bit more work than under FreeNAS.

 

[SwampRabbit]

The assumption could be made that you are looking for something with a GUI, even a WebGUI would work?

There is starting to be a plethora of server OSes like this.
I will second SME or Zentyal, I messed with them a bit, before I decided to just use Debian for a basic file server (probably not what you want).

You can also look at ClearOS Community Edition, it is based off of CentOS, and like anodos said CentOS is proved to be very reliable for many things.
I have not tried ClearOS, but have heard good things, and have wanted to tinker with its gateway functions a bit.

These types of OSes can do a lot of stuff, much more than you said you were looking for.

You could look at OpenMediaVault
Their wiki says this:

i486 or amd64 platform
1 GiB RAM
2 GiB HDD/DOM/CF/USB Thumb Drive used as OpenMediaVault system drive.
1 HDD for data storage​

But everything everyone mentioned will run decently (to a degree) on your hardware, even with 4GB of ram.
I ran Zentyal in a test bed on a AMD ATHLON II x2 250 (think it was this one) and 4GB of ram, was ok enough.

 

[Knowltey]

(2x2) 4GB DDR3 1333 Ram

You are below minimum system requirements.

 

[Whattteva]

Personally the only Linux distro I'll use in production is red hat or centos 6.x. Unfortunately, setting it up will take a bit more work than under FreeNAS.

I'd add Debian stable into that. It's pretty much as rock solid as it gets.

The assumption could be made that you are looking for something with a GUI, even a WebGUI would work?

There is starting to be a plethora of server OSes like this.
I will second SME or Zentyal, I messed with them a bit, before I decided to just use Debian for a basic file server (probably not what you want).

You can also look at ClearOS Community Edition, it is based off of CentOS, and like anodos said CentOS is proved to be very reliable for many things.
I have not tried ClearOS, but have heard good things, and have wanted to tinker with its gateway functions a bit.

These types of OSes can do a lot of stuff, much more than you said you were looking for.

You could look at OpenMediaVault
Their wiki says this:

i486 or amd64 platform
1 GiB RAM
2 GiB HDD/DOM/CF/USB Thumb Drive used as OpenMediaVault system drive.
1 HDD for data storage​

But everything everyone mentioned will run decently (to a degree) on your hardware, even with 4GB of ram.
I ran Zentyal in a test bed on a AMD ATHLON II x2 250 (think it was this one) and 4GB of ram, was ok enough.

+1. Lots of great suggestions there.

 

[Pontiac75]

If you're storing movies, music and home entertainment files just buy some more RAM and run a non-ECC system.

I'm a noob, but I've been running ZFS on non-ECC for a couple of months now and it works fine.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm a noob, but I've been running ZFS on non-ECC for a couple of months now and it works fine.

I love people who make statements like this. Why? Because it shows your total ignorance for the whole ECC versus non-ECC debate. Nobody ever said it wouldn't work.

You sound like a car salesman I met years ago. He was showing me a red car and I told him I didn't want red because i'd end up with a higher insurance premium. His response was awesome. "You know its illegal to charge more for insurance because of the color of your car?" No duh, but that's not the problem. I'll pay more because I'll get more tickets statistically which DOES translate to higher premiums.

Sorry, but you skipped some *very* important information and your post is basically somewhat dishonest. Whether that's because you don't even understand the whole story yourself or because you just want to do the hand waving and "see.. I did it and everything is fine" I don't know. Both are laughable though because neither one do any good when it comes to protecting your data (which is what we're talking about when we are in this forum).

 

[Pontiac75]

Uh. You didn't quote the part where I said if you're storing home entertainment it's fine. Stuff that can be easily replaced or re-ripped.

I hope to use an ECC setup some day when I've got the budget and I see your point.

 

[Knowltey]

Uh. You didn't quote the part where I said if you're storing home entertainment it's fine. Stuff that can be easily replaced or re-ripped.

I hope to use an ECC setup some day when I've got the budget and I see your point.

Uh... last I checked non-ECC RAM does't give a shit whterher it's home media data or business data. When it goes bad it goes bad, it's not going to go "Oh look, this is home video, I guess I shouldn't flip this bit after all."

An error is an error is an error is an error.

 

[Pontiac75]

You're missing the point. I'm talking about non critical data on a budget.

 

[Knowltey]

Budget? Well I said it in another thread and I'll say it here, the price difference between ECC and non is minimal, it can even be cheaper. The server I built the other day would've actually been more expensive if I didn't go with ECC and wanted the same performance, and would've had less features. I literally saved 30 bucks simply be going with ECC over non-ECC because the ECC DIMM I got was 10 bucks cheaper than the cheapest same size same performance non-ECC DIMM from a reliable manufacturer (ie not random Chinese nobody brands) that I could find, and the cheapest motherboard I could find from a reliable manufacturer as well that supported the performance I needed not only was 20 dollars more expensive, but didn't have IPMI and only had one NIC rather than two.

So in other words the cost for the piece of mind of ECC, IPMI, and an extra NIC was figuring out what to do with the 30 dollars I didn't spend. I really should've just spend the extra $30 on some non-ECC hardware so that I wouldn't have had to have dealt with the poor service at that steakhouse I went to.

You're saying it's fine to use non-ECC in a home situation? That isn't only flat out wrong, it is he complete opposite of correct. It is even more important to be using ECC in a home situation due to the much lower likelihood of having actual proper backups, so you have to minimalist the risk of data loss as much as possible, and ECC is the cheapest and easiest way to achieve that.

 

[TXAG26]

Ignorance is bliss...until you loose a ton of data and come here whining!

BTW, I've heard a rumor that Cyberjock keeps a running list of these ignorant comments and when these posters come back with their data loss horror stories, he really let's them have it! Just a rumor though...

 

[Knowltey]

Ignorance is bliss...until you loose a ton of data and come here whining!

BTW, I've heard a rumor that Cyberjock keeps a running list of these ignorant comments and when these posters come back with their data loss horror stories, he really let's them have it! Just a rumor though...

Lol, I think that may be worth an experiment.

 

[Z300M]

Ignorance is bliss...until you loose a ton of data and come here whining!

Or, to put it another way: running FreeNAS on consumer-grade desktop hardware without ECC RAM works just fine -- until it doesn't and you find that all your files have disappeared into a big black hole.