BUILD Hardware advice

[Steven Rush]

Hello,

I am completely new to FreeNAS, and would appreciate some advice. I plan to use this setup for pictures, music, family video and occasional movie streaming. I currently have 120GB of the 1.0 TB used. Eventually I will move to 4 disk, 4 TB+/-. Here is my setup:

FreeNAS-8.0.3-RELEASE-x64 (9395)
MotherBoard: ASUS M3A76-CM Rev 1.00G
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 620
Memory: 8GB DDR2 6400 (non ECC)
PSU: HEC 400w
4 Disks, ZFS, 1.0 TB

This is currently up and running. I am figuring I should upgrade the PSU. I have room to upgrade the processor, but I am guessing I don't need to. I put this together with scrap parts and only want to purchase what is needed. Whatever is fine I want to leave alone.

I am open to any thoughts or criticism to reach my stated goals with some reliability. I am not saying that I have had any, but i'm guessing I will with that PSU.

Thanks,

Steven

 

[nojohnny101]

Is there a particular reason you have chosen FreeNAS? The reason I ask is because you a number of your components would need upgrading to come into "recommended compliance" with what FreeNAS strongly recommends. For instance:
1) your motherboard does not support ECC ram it appears. ECC is not required obviously but is strongly recommend for data integrity.
2) your motherboard only supports a maximum of 8GB which is problematic if you start increasing your storage. there is nothing that FreeNAS likes more than RAM and the general rule of thumb (again not a requirement, but stability is not guaranteed below recommendations) is to have 1GB of RAM per 1TB of Raw Storage. if you increased your pool size to 4 x 4TB you're 8GB would be woefully inadequate and you might/might not see problems.
3) have you not upgraded to the latest version of FreeNAS because of increase bare minimum requirements (as I outlined above)? many people on here recommend running 9.3.1 at the very least unless you have a reason not to (which in your case, might be because your hardware could start to show problems).

How long have you had this machine running? Maybe you should look into NAS4Free which has lower minimum requirements but still gives you the benefits of ZFS.

Hope this helps.

 

[Steven Rush]

There is one misunderstanding, the 4 drives would be a total of 4TB, not 4TB each. As for the version of freenas, I installed it probably 6 months ago, and have had it running since then. I did not intentionally use an older version, and when I decided to do something with it I came here first to get some advice.

 

[Steven Rush]

Apparently I need to decide between making this a project I want to sink money into, or a different options such as Nas4free as you suggest.

 

[nojohnny101]

There is one misunderstanding, the 4 drives would be a total of 4TB, not 4TB each.

My bad! Misread that there.

I installed it probably 6 months ago

6 months ago? I don't think it would have been possible to download that old a version (even 6 months ago) without digging in the archives.

A lot of people pull together old hardware to test FreeNAS on and they never have any problems. And it sounds like you have it running now but I just don't want you to get a false sense of security because FreeNAS was really built for server grade hardware (things like ECC ram). The last thing I would want you to do is to start putting important things on there that you can't afford to lose and then have the system crash.

Post if you have anymore question. This is a good community here.

 

[Stux]

8GB ECC RAM -- both my and your motherboards do claim to support ECC, then again I've never actually proved the ECC works...

Try running dmidecode from the command line to verify your system sees the extra data bits.

My toy system system also 'supports' ECC, i.e. It'll boot with ECC ram, but it won't utilize ECC :(

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

BIOS flakiness that randomizes device boot order

Have you tried replacing the battery?