Checking you out from Minnesota

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I'm running an old Solaris box (Athlon X2) with 8 hot-swap data drive bays. Been running it since 2006, which means I'm lucky not to have broken anything yet :). (Have replaced disk drives various times for size upgrade reasons, probably why none of them have died on the job yet.) ZFS was what drove me to that Solaris box.

Looking around at my options (commercial, Illumos, FreeNAS, ?) for a ZFS-based small home server that serves primarily to Windows boxes. Currently still thinking of running on the same hardware.

I use it for storing everything (no local disk on my Windows boxes except a small boot SSD). Lots of digital photos, and I run Photoshop and Bibble/Aftershot and Photo Mechanic, and getting into Photo Ninja it seems; all quite a lot.

I'm a software engineer professionally, and in fact got onto ZFS originally because I was working for Sun when it was made publicly available. I was working for the group that designed the "Thumper" (released as X4500), but over on the user interface side of the Sun Streaming Server.

ETA: I should say that this would be my first experience installing FreeBSD for production use. I've run Linux and Solaris at home and at work for various things, and use Windows on my primary desktop since photo processing is my most-constraining application. So that would be another interesting learning experience, I guess, eh?

 

[cyberjock]

It sounds like you might have some fun with FreeNAS.

If you read through the FreeNAS manual, my guide(link in the sig), the FAQ and read the stickies in the help sections of the forums it should be a pretty good primer to get you started without making any major noobie mistakes. I know many people aren't fond of reading manuals but please give it a chance. It's very well written and has some great recommendations in there.

I'm the same way as you regarding disk storage. I run SSDs on all of my machines and use my FreeNAS server for my bulk storage.

Welcome to the forums!

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Thanks for your answers. I've been using your manual, but haven't yet read it systematically; I am a manual reader, though, so I'm sure I will at some point. (I installed the V9 alpha in a virtual machine to play with, since I decluttered enough not have scratch computers lying around.) (I'll of course step down to a stable version if I deploy it in production.)