FreeNas 8 (without ZFS)

[Bluejay]

Hi everyone, this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked / answered before (I did search).

What is the recommended hardware for FreeNas 8 if not using ZFS?

I have been using ver 7 and older on spare hardware for a while and was wondering if it was worth trying 8. I would refer to use low power (quiet) hardware with 2Gb ram. Without ZFS are the hardware requirements for 8 significantly higher than 7?

Thanks

 

[Milhouse]

Atom-level hardware performs just fine with ZFS, the main requirement is plenty of RAM - 4GB would be my minimum (preferably 8GB) though you can run FreeNAS/ZFS with less memory, but with sometimes unpredictable results.

If switching to FN8 I'd strongly recommend you use ZFS than not, and if ZFS is out of the question then stay with FreeNAS 7.

 

[joeschmuck]

IMO you should run a 64 CPU so you can run the 64-bit version of FreNAS 8. It runs ZFS much better and more people are using it so it gets more testing time. As Milhouse said, 4GB of RAM is generally recommended minimum based on users having difficulties with 2GB and less for ZFS. If you do not want to use ZFS and rather use UDF I believe 2GB RAM and the 32-bit version will work just fine but you should run the 64-bit version if possible. And you will hear this from many people, we all seem to be recommending ZFS if your system can support it.

Last comment... FreeNAS 8 is not complete so if you are looking for UPnP or other features, run FreeNAS in a Virtual Machine if you can so you can play with it without dedicating some hardware to it. That will give you a very good feel for it.

-Mark

 

[triassic]

I have a similar question. I have a "Lacie Ethernet Disk" with 224 MB of RAM. I installed FreeNAS 8 on it, and it appears to work fine. (using UFS) Will I be okay, or once I put it into use will it run into memory issues? It's only used for nightly backups, not used as a file server or anything. I'd use FreeNAS 7, but I want the snapshot feature in 8. (snapshots work with UFS too, right?)

 

[joeschmuck]

UFS doesn't require memory like ZFS so you might be okay. I don't know your answer but maybe someone here does. My answer would be to test it for a week with non-important data. Start up nightly backups to it and if you can validate the backup files (forces reading all that data) that might prove the stability for you. If you can perform more than one backup per day that would help speed up the process but definitely run it for a week without rebooting or powering it down for your own peace of mind. And since the file system would be UFS it will be readable from many operating systems should FreeNAS or your computer die on you. You could plug it into another computer and boot Ubuntu or something like it and read the drive data. I don't know about the snapshots question.

 

[epretorious]

IMO you should run a 64 CPU so you can run the 64-bit version of FreNAS 8. It runs ZFS much better and more people are using it so it gets more testing time. As Milhouse said, 4GB of RAM is generally recommended minimum based on users having difficulties with 2GB and less for ZFS. If you do not want to use ZFS and rather use UDF I believe 2GB RAM and the 32-bit version will work just fine but you should run the 64-bit version if possible. And you will hear this from many people, we all seem to be recommending ZFS if your system can support it.

What should I do, Mark? My Acer H340 has an Intel Atom 230 CPU but is limited to 2GB of RAM.

 

[ProtoSD]

Since the original question was running FreeNAS without utilizing ZFS...

@epretorious, you should be fine with 2GB if you use UFS. I'm not sure if that's a 64 bit Atom, so you'll have to check, but if it is use the AMD64 ISO to install with. You could install FreeNAS on your USB flash drive and just boot it up to see how it runs, but just DON'T create any volumes unless you want to wipe out everything on your internal hard drive.

 

[epretorious]

@protosd Oops - I must have gotten confused in my wanderings: I thought that you'd made a distinction between UFS on 32-bit and UFS on 64-bit in this thread. The Intel Atom 230 is a 64-bit CPU so I'll use UFS with the FreeNAS/amd64.

 

[joeschmuck]

I made the distinction that the 64-bit version is used much more than the 32-bit version. Using UFS with your system should be more than fine. When you get it operational maybe you could post how well you feel it's working.

-Mark