Newbie as well...
Hello Annie.
Ironic...I was born in Holland, but now reside in the States...
I just went through my first Freenas build. Started With V7 but ended up with V8.
There are pros and cons to either if you read through the forums.
One big difference are the hardware requirements. V7 is a bit more forgiving with older hardware and also requires less resources then V8.
As I mentioned I started with V7, which worked fine until I switched from raid5 to ZFS (I was using the latest V7 "Nightly Build"). Prior to doing this I had my data backed up on another HD.
Anyway I started having issues with setting permissions under V7 when I wanted to copy the data back to the newly configured drives.
After a while I got frustrated with it (probably due to lack of experience with V7) and decided to try V8.
I found the Web Interface in V8 to be a bit more user friendly (just my own opinion) and had the new "box" configured in no time.
This is what I ended up with:
- AMD Athlon II X2 250U CPU (low power)
- 8GB DDR3 1333
- Biostar A880+GU3 Motherboard
- 2GB CF card and CF to IDE adapter (system boots from the flash card)
- 3 x 2TB Sata Green drives in ZFS Raid1 config.
- Mid tower Atx case
So far it has served me well.
Good luck on your research and potential "new Build".
Bart
