Big drive on old board

[Lordadmiral Drake]

I'm beginning to run out of storage space on the single 1TB drive I currently have in my FreeNAS box. so I thought about throwing in a 4TB WD Red drive but I'm unsure if I can use the full capacity on my old board which is a Foxconn 945G7MD-K2SH featuring an Intel ICH7 Southbridge. I don't currently have the funds to replace that old stuff with new server-grade hardware in addition to a bigger drive, wich would cost me about 600€ (with drive).
So, does anyone know if the ICH7 support HDDs that large?

 

[cyberjock]

Why not go to the manufacturer of your board and look it up? This isn't a FreeNAS question at all, so I' not sure why you are posting here.. I'm going to move this to "off topic".

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

Because I didnt find any info on maximum drive size there

 

[cyberjock]

Ok... not to sound like a jerk, but I'm not sure why you are asking here. That hardware is far from what is recommended for FreeNAS.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

Well, I don't have the money for new server-grade stuff, and when I came across FreeNAS in the first place I thought it to be just a minimal, sleek and simple NAS OS for beginners. And now I don't want to switch my Server OS for the third time (been using WHS v1 and Ubuntu before). I'm hoping to get some money together this year though in order to buy server-grade hardware

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, our minimum requirements have been set not by performance but by reliability. We've had people losing pools left and right from ignoring those minimum requirements. I'd strongly recommend you consider either meeting the minimum requirements or looking for an alternative solution.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

At least my data drive is running on UFS. I'm currently looking to acquire a low-cost "set" of hardware (CPU, memory, mainboard)
CPU-wise I'm thinking of a low-end Celeron G (not looking to do any transcoding or other fancy stuff), But I'll make a post in the hardware section once I have a selection

 

[cyberjock]

In all seriousness, if money is an issue(not sure what your limits are) there's alot of old server grade stuff with 8GB+ of RAM that will run FreeNAS very well on ebay. There's lots of hand-me-down Supermicro servers(some are 24 slot full servers for like $350-500). They won't set performance records, but they will easily satisfy your standard home server.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

Hmm, I shall take a look there then. Maybe I can save a buck or two