Could FreeNAS work with a 2 disk system?

[nfinity]

So here is my plan and what I have. I hope to use a 2 disk config. I have a WD red 3TB drive that I just bought and 5400rpm 750GB laptop drive. My budget is tight. Can you config freeNAS without RAID. I only would want to run my 3TB drive as my main drive in the system, and run backups to my 750GB drive... No raid1 and I don't think UFS or ZFS would work with such a config. Is this doing able.. and if so what file system would I choose? Thank you for your advice in advance.

 

[danb35]

As of the current version, FreeNAS is ZFS-only, so the filesystem decision is an easy one. If you otherwise meet the hardware specs (64-bit processor and 8 GB RAM as the most relevant ones), yes, you can run FreeNAS with two single-disk volumes. You won't have any redundancy for your data, of course, outside of whatever manual backups you might do.

 

[nfinity]

My plan was to run it on a Celeron 1037u and well... 4GB of memory to keep costs down... I know this has been said so many times that 8GB of RAM is minimum.... I thought maybe I could get anyway with it with my RAID-less setup and could deal with a small performance hit possible if it would occur. I have no plans of using deduplication on my setup.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I doubt you can "get away with" 4GB. Any more when you are using 8GB you are basically "getting away with it". Upgrade your hardware for freenas or you are going to have a bad experience.

 

[nfinity]

Well, in that case, If I can find a good deal on RAM and get 8GBs, freeNAS seems the way to go. Else NAS4Free seems like a good option for a simple budge build.
hardware requirements are much lower for ZFS (as low as 1GB memory)
http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=documentation:setup_and_user_guide:hardware_requirements

 

[no_connection]

You can definitely use older versions. (just know that vulnerabilities exists and will be used is someone finds it)
Hardware rec is pretty much the same for both now. Don't get hung up on hard numbers on a sheet and think you can get away with less using nas4free.
ZFS is the elephant you need to keep happy to keep your data happy.

Without that it's just a gui and some plugins or features. (which is why FreeNAS is better imho) (oh and how you implement things)

Do yourself a favor and do it right. I know bodging is a fun way to learn or make something quick. But when you want something to work without having to re-bodge it again every time. It's worth it.

I went with Debian on an very unsuitable office computer for NAS for a friend. Learned a few thing but not sure it's worth is.

 

[nfinity]

Thanks for your input.

Older versions of freeNAS which could be less memory dependent is what I'm guessing you mean? That could be a viable option. I would not setup my server to be accessed outside my network. I have no need for that.

What I had planned....

MB and CPU - $63 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135342
4 or 8GB x1 RAM - $30-$60
Flash drive - FREE - I have one
picoPSU - $35
case - FREE or around $40 I have a case which would work
Drives for storage - Already purchased/had 2 drives
Total - about $130 to $200 not including drives.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

I do a lot of repairs / builds for friends and family so I end up with a fair amount of old hardware (mostly junk). Once in a while something decent comes in, so now I am using a donor computer with 12G of RAM and a 3TB HDD for my system. Works well, and it is a single disk system. I keep a backup 3TB drive on my main computer and keep the data sync'ed between the 3TB on the freeNAS and the 3TB on my main system. Ask around friends and family - someone may have an old computer you can use, or grab some parts (memory?) out of it.

 

[jgreco]

Older versions of freeNAS which could be less memory dependent is what I'm guessing you mean? That could be a viable option. I would not setup my server to be accessed outside my network. I have no need for that.

Only really old versions of FreeNAS can do ZFS on less than 8GB; we started hearing about problems around ZFS v28 I want to say. You can run FreeNAS on UFS on less memory AND on x86 hardware, but you have to go back a few versions to do that since it's all-ZFS now.

 

[sremick]

If you don't want RAID why use ZFS? And if you aren't using ZFS why use FreeNAS? It seems like FreeNAS is not the right product for you. It's not for use on old, recycled low-end hardware. It's high-end free NAS appliance software with minimum hardware requirements quite a bit higher than your average simple unix-style OS.

 

[nfinity]

Thanks Chris and jgreco for your advice.

Sremick - Correct, I really have no need for RAID so yeah ZFS isn't much of a needed feature for me. I currently have about 600GBs of data and its not climbing super fast. Maybe a 100 GBs a year. I thought FreeNAS would work well and I see it comes with some nice features but maybe your right. I could possible get away with just running windows 7/8 and have windows shares.... I know this forum really isn't here to talk about things other than freeNAS but if any other OSs that you think could work, please let me know.

 

[nfinity]

Issue with windows os is I can't run it from a usb flash drive. Really don't want to buy another drive just for the os.

 

[danb35]

There are a number of BSD and Linux-based systems that will go on, and run from, a thumb drive and share data from attached hard drives. Some you may want to consider include NAS4Free (the former FreeNAS), unRAID, and XPEnology. The latter is Synology's system available for free on commodity hardware, and from the little bit of playing with it that I've done, it seems pretty nice.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

Regarding sremick's comments, if I were using FreeNAS in a serious server application where data integrity was a must, then I would absolutely invest in the proper hardware as he points out. If you read through any of the FreeNAS documentation, it clearly states what you should use and why.

I looked at the canned systems from Synology, QNAP, et al., and they can get expensive. I thought surely you could use a home PC as a simple (non-Windows OS) server. So I looked into it and everything I read pointed to FreeNAS. I thought I would see if I could make it work since I have all the hardware sitting around.

For me, FreeNAS does exactly what I need - fast, easy access to network stored data from all 4 home computers and I have $0 invested. Well, I did buy a new 3TB hdd, but I was going to buy that anyway as a backup hdd. So the way I keep the data sychronized between the hdd's of two separate systems (home PC and FreeNAS server), I am not too worried if the FreeNAS system (hardware) dies. I like the way FreeNAS works and I am becoming 'attached' to it (pun intended), so I may be willing to shell out some $ in the future for the proper hardware when the time comes.

 

[nfinity]

Chris, I'm basically in the same boat as you. At home I have a desktop, 2 laptops and one day a HTPC which would make the most use out of the server streaming movies. I'll have my data backed up on an external drive so it won't be super critical if the server went down and I couldn't retrieve my data from it.

I'm simply looking for a solution to better access and store my data. As said earlier, don't want to spend a lot of money on this and I my plan to go with a Celeron 1037U and a picoPSU is to be very economical wattage wise. If its powerful enough to saturate a Gigabyte NIC, I'd be very happy.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

I am sure you will like it. I am transferring a 50G file now and it is averaging about 110MB/s.

 

[nfinity]

Very nice.
Do you think a Celeron 1037U could handle it? Its performance is equal to or better than the Core2 Duo E6700 at 1/3 the watts.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

I can't really say much on processing power. I am using an AMD 1090T because that is what I had to use. It is a 6 core processor, so it is likely overkill. I have only seen the CPU usage level at no more than 20% during data transfer. The FreeNAS GUI has a way to monitor system performance. I don't do any streaming. From what I have read, FreeNAS is more Intel friendly than AMD, but my AMD unit works. I think memory is more important, and all the FreeNAS gurus will tell you that you can't have too much memory...

 

[nfinity]

I'm pretty sure a Celeron 1037U would work. Have you always used 12GB of memory? Wondering how 8GB would fair mainly when transferring files. Believe that would be the most taxing time unless anyone else has an input

 

[Chris Dawalt]

Yes on the 12G RAM - the computer had two 4g sticks, and there were two spare slots, and I had two more sticks of 2G each, so I stuck them in there and it worked, so I left them in. Never tried it with just 8, but as you know that is the minimum. I believe you are correct as to when the system sees a load - during data transfer. Look at the FreeNAS documentation - I think there is a white list of 'approved' CPUs.