FreeNAS using external USB drive as volume

[voyager848]

I have a PC with Windows 8.1 installed on the internal drive. I do not want to disturb the installation. My plan is to setup a thumb drive with FreeNAS, attach an external USB drive and boot FreeNAS and only use the external USB drive as storage. I do not want to disturb the internal drive in any way. The PC has 4 GB of RAM and an AES-NI Intel CPU so I plan to setup an Encrypted ZFS volume.

Possible? Do you foresee any problems with this installation?
Thanks

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

Yes, a lot of problems.

1. Running ZFS over USB is not really a supported configuration and I feel quite confident that this will give you no end of trouble.
2. You need at least 8 GB of memory to safely run FreeNAS with ZFS volumes.
3. To safely run ZFS you need ECC memory which is not something you find on desktop systems.

Honestly I don't see what you would accomplish by using a desktop pc for a nas, I would recommend that you read this thread on hardware suggestions. Also check out "the manual"

 

[voyager848]

Interesting points:

This desktop PC is rarely used which is why I was looking to convert it into a mostly NAS. What about running UFS in the above mentioned configuration? Better?

Thanks.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

A lot actually. But you should know that FreeNAS in general has poor support for desktop class hardware. If you wish to reuse that pc you might actually be better of with a linux distribution of some kind, since it has much better support for that kind of hardware.

But still I would at least use an internal drive if it is going to be a server.

 

[rm-r]

you should know that FreeNAS in general has poor support for desktop class hardware

plus one to this - i had heaps of trouble with connectivity - then bouge the gear in my signature - but others in my office have been fine - only one way to find out.... just remember you could loose all your data - that's the risk

 

[Knowltey]

A lot actually. But you should know that FreeNAS in general has poor support for desktop class hardware.

Hell, that's just BSD in general, FreeNAS just takes it a step further by tacking on a filesystem that also doesn't play well at all with consumer grade hardware.