FreeNAS on Thecus n5550

[mururoa]

Hi there,

Just to say I successfully use FreeNAS on Thecus n5550.
Only 'problem' is that I cant use the LCD display. Maybe it's usable.
Very compact 5 bays NAS with 3.5" drives you can still buy today.
Enough power for Freenas with Atom D2550 dual core.
Since I use jails I upgraded the ram to 8 GB (recommanded for FreeNAS) but before I used it with 4 GB without problem.
I have already replaced drives and reinstalled FreeNAS since first USB key for FreeNAS collapsed. 0 loss of data.

Very efficient hardware for FreeNAS IMHO. You can barely have cheaper hardware and you just can't have hardware with this energy efficiency AND space efficiency.
I'm not in any way affiliated with Thecus. Well, ofc, otherwise I wont have dropped their wonderful (sic !) Thecus OS for FreeNAS ;)

 

[brando56894]

Haha no way? I had the N4550 before I made the jump to FreeNAS. The UI was nice, but upgrading the plugins sucked horribly.

 

[mururoa]

No way what ?
You can have better compact 5 bays hardware for sub 400$ ? And that's for new hardware. I guess you can have something like sub 300 $ for used.
If so, I would be glad to know since a better cpu and more ram would be nice to have.

 

[brando56894]

"no way" as in "you can really do that? awesome!" I wanted to try and run pure Linux on my 4550 but couldn't figure out a way to do it.

 

[mururoa]

Dunno about 4550 but 5550 has hdmi output so basically you can install any system that support it's hardware very easy with screen and keyboard. There is really any trick for installing FreeNAS on it.

 

[brando56894]

The 4550 also had an HDMI port, the OS was embedded on a flash chip, idk if yours if different. I tried to get mine to boot from a flash drive and it wouldn't work.

 

[mururoa]

On 5550 the OS is also on a small flash device (1 or 2 GB) called DOM.
But it can boot on internal drives or USB devices. F2 at boot and you can enter bios and change boot order like any PC.
Freenas is installed on a SLC 8 GB USB 3.0 key.

 

[brando56894]

Ah looks like they made improvements to it. The thing that really annoyed me about my 4550 was the way you had to update the plugins: for Plex I would have to shut the plugin down, SSH into it, copy the Plex metadata folder to a new location, uninstall the old Plex version, install the new Plex version, then copy the metadata (GBs worth) back over, then start the plugin up again! The straw that broke the camel's back was when I was using the front panel display after adding a new disk to my array (or something like that) and it asked if I wanted to destroy the array, I hit "no!" but it decided to do it anyway. 5 TB gone in the blink of an eye. After that I sold it on Ebay haha

 

[Stux]

Pretty cool

Can you post a dmesg?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hi there,

Just to say I successfully use FreeNAS on Thecus n5550.
Only 'problem' is that I cant use the LCD display. Maybe it's usable.
Very compact 5 bays NAS with 3.5" drives you can still buy today.
Enough power for Freenas with Atom D2550 dual core.
Since I use jails I upgraded the ram to 8 GB (recommanded for FreeNAS) but before I used it with 4 GB without problem.
I have already replaced drives and reinstalled FreeNAS since first USB key for FreeNAS collapsed. 0 loss of data.

Very efficient hardware for FreeNAS IMHO. You can barely have cheaper hardware and you just can't have hardware with this energy efficiency AND space efficiency.
I'm not in any way affiliated with Thecus. Well, ofc, otherwise I wont have dropped their wonderful (sic !) Thecus OS for FreeNAS ;)

If you use less than 8GB of memory it might work until one day your system will reboot and all your data will be gone. If using plugins you need 16GB of memory not 8.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[LabDog]

My test Machine.
Thecus W4000 bought at Newegg on sale 50% off($199.99).
Processor: Intel® Atom™ D2701 (2.13GHz Dual Core)
System Memory: 2GB DDR3 (Memory expanded to 8GB)
Embedded Boot Drive: 60GB SSD (Disconnected using flash drive)
Drive Bays: 4 (Two 1TB drives striped(add two later mirrored)
Disk Interface: 4 x SATA for internal
1 x eSATA for external
LAN Interface: 2 x 10/100/1000 RJ-45
USB Interface: 2 x 2.0 port (back)
2 x 3.0 port (front)
HDMI port (back)
VGA port (back)
Power Supply External power adapter
PCI-e Slot x1
Dimensions (HxWxD) 192 x 172 x 250 (mm)/ 7.56 x 6.77 x 9.84 (in)

Tested with;
9.10 Stable w/two jails(Plex Server - FreeBSD(Zone Minder)) Not a lot of testing but runs good.
9.10 Nightly(Current Install) w/two jails(Plex Server - FreeBSD(Zone Minder)) Runs good.
10 Beta Hard time getting the first install loaded (pre Beta) After that updated through GUI.
Pro's
Hard to beat small server for the price. Memory and drives where spare parts. Total cost $199.99.
Con's
No ECC memory support, no support for virtualization. FreeNAS 10 is a maybe, missing the best part with out Docker.
FWIW
Having fun pushing this past what it was designed for.