hardware requirement

[fuyun1965]

Hi, I used FreeNas 7 on a P4-3G machine with 3G RAM, 3 pcs WD 2T green drives.
I am planning another Freenas box.
Can I use an old P4-3G machine with max. 4G RAM, 3 pcs Hitachi 2T harddisk (ZFS) for the new FreeNAS 8?
NIC is a gigabit NIC card.

The reason that I want to use FreeNAS 8, is the snapshots feature.

Or should I just stay in FreeNas 7?

Thanks!

 

[ohnename]

Is your Pentium4 a socket 478 or socket 775? Socket 478 is 32bit only, socket 775 is 32bit and 64bit (not all CPUs)
I got it working with a similar config (Celeron 2,6GHz, 2GB, 32bit) but it is a little bit slow.
A 64bit CPU and 4GB are recommended for FN8 and ZFS.

 

[fuyun1965]

My board is 775 socket. The CPU is 630. Installing 64bit should not be a problem.
But my HDDs are 7200rpm Sata, which should not be fast enough to using fast CPU. Am I right?

 

[fuyun1965]

I will not add more HDD to the pool. Is ZFS useful for me? Or I just use software raid 5 instead of ZFS RaidZ？

 

[ohnename]

With your 64bit CPU + 4GB RAM you should be able to run FN8 (amd64) and a RAIDZ pool without any problems.
7200rpm is not too slow, only high-end server HDDs runs with 10 or 15k rpm. I am using 5400 rpm HDDs.

 

[fuyun1965]

Thanks!
I will go for FN8.
By the way, can I mix using 1T 512byte/Sec. drives and 1T 4096byte/Sec. drives to form Raidz on FN8?