Cluster One
Cadet
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2013
- Messages
- 1
Hello,
A friend of mine recommended I check out FreeNAS. Over the past couple of years I have been saving to build a couple of "servers" its just now the operating system that's on now, I'll admit its, Windows Home Server 2011.
I wanted to check out FreeNAS and see if its something that would work for me and two of my computers that I use. I am decent with Windows & Linux operating systems. A year ago I took and old system and made a ClearOS Box out of it, its currently still running I had to reboot it a month ago sadly, but its back working on an uptime record. I have it running off an old AMD x4 640 with 4gb of DDR2-800mhz RAM and a 2x750gb drives in a mirror raid setup.
We do a lot of streaming in this house, be it the WDTV Lives, Gaming Consoles, usually someone in the family is streaming Netflix, Amazon, or locally from a computer.
Here's the deal I recently built a new rig, FX-8350 with 16gb DDR-1866 and 1tb boot drive, (win8) and a 4tb drive for storage, its basically for gaming. I tend to play a lot of MMORPG's, and Battlefield 3, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor. That machine I use for my typical day to day stuff.
I have two other machines, mostly parts left over from previous builds. These are the one's that are sadly in Windows Home Server 2011.
Machine #1 is an Intel i7-870 with 16gb of DDR3-1333mhz RAM, It had a 1tb boot drive, 6 internal 2tb drives (mixed manufactures) various WD Green, Samsung 2040ui, Hitachi.
I built this machine about 3+ years ago and just kept adding to it. I even bought 2 of the 5 bay Sans Digital with the RocketRaid 622 controller card, these units are plugged in by eSata on the back and this card supports up to 10 drives. I have 10 Samsung 2040ui's plugged in, running in JBOD mode, since these are not RAID level drives, there is no reason to run them as a RAID. So my problem becomes as we all know Windows uses drive lettering, so having C-R can be rather annoying. (I got the bulk of these drives before the floods hit.)
Machine #2 is an AMD 1090t x6 with 32gb of DDR3-1333mhz RAM, it has currently a 120gb SSD (boot) 1 750gb, 2x1.5tb and 2x3tb drives. This also runs Windows Home Server 2012 but it has limitations. It will only use 8gb of ram, not the full amount, even though it will show it, it still refuses to even use it. I got the ram on sale from a place in town that had it returned a customer brought it back claiming it was faulty, I ran memtest on it for 72 hours and 0 errors so obviously the previous owner didn't get the exact match for his motherboard.
My goal is too create 2 separate box's, one will allow for a media center (the one with the most drives.) and the other as a backup server for all the other home computers that family uses, in case of a failure their data won't be lost.
The biggest questions I have are:
1. Would FreeNAS work with Machine #1 to create sort of a fakeraid (or possibly using the onboard) as a raid, even the RocketRaid card (which really isn't a true raid card.) to create not one single array but maybe 1 for the 6 internal drives, and 1 for each 5 bay sans digital. I wouldn't do RAID 5 because writing to them would be slow. Also which RAID level would be best for me to allow for speed and space. I'm really not worried about a drive going for parity.
2. Would FreeNAS work with Machine #2 to allow my family to create backup's of their PC's onto it that was say if their storage drives crashes and we get it replaced, we swap it out and can restore the data.
3. Can I create accounts on FreeNAS that would allow me to control what others in the house can access, have read/write privileges, or not see the share at all.
4. Even though Machine #1 does have a lot of drives, really combining them down would help a lot to just a few mounts. I know fake raids are not approved of but I have heard of people having success with them.
I'm trying to not spend anymore money unless I have too. the NTFS file system alone on larger drives is not playing well when you begin to fill those drives up. I know of EXT3/4 I have installed Fedora Linux before but it didn't play nice with that RocketRaid card. However they have built new drivers for it that would allow me to compile it with later versions. Apparently these units sold a lot and not everyone used Windows so they decided to go back and release updated drives.
Anyways, I figured I would ask, I have taken some time off my work due to Chronic Pain issues and until the doctor gets me in which will be a couple of months I have so much free time on my hand its really had me looking around.
I appreciate any feedback.
A friend of mine recommended I check out FreeNAS. Over the past couple of years I have been saving to build a couple of "servers" its just now the operating system that's on now, I'll admit its, Windows Home Server 2011.
I wanted to check out FreeNAS and see if its something that would work for me and two of my computers that I use. I am decent with Windows & Linux operating systems. A year ago I took and old system and made a ClearOS Box out of it, its currently still running I had to reboot it a month ago sadly, but its back working on an uptime record. I have it running off an old AMD x4 640 with 4gb of DDR2-800mhz RAM and a 2x750gb drives in a mirror raid setup.
We do a lot of streaming in this house, be it the WDTV Lives, Gaming Consoles, usually someone in the family is streaming Netflix, Amazon, or locally from a computer.
Here's the deal I recently built a new rig, FX-8350 with 16gb DDR-1866 and 1tb boot drive, (win8) and a 4tb drive for storage, its basically for gaming. I tend to play a lot of MMORPG's, and Battlefield 3, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor. That machine I use for my typical day to day stuff.
I have two other machines, mostly parts left over from previous builds. These are the one's that are sadly in Windows Home Server 2011.
Machine #1 is an Intel i7-870 with 16gb of DDR3-1333mhz RAM, It had a 1tb boot drive, 6 internal 2tb drives (mixed manufactures) various WD Green, Samsung 2040ui, Hitachi.
I built this machine about 3+ years ago and just kept adding to it. I even bought 2 of the 5 bay Sans Digital with the RocketRaid 622 controller card, these units are plugged in by eSata on the back and this card supports up to 10 drives. I have 10 Samsung 2040ui's plugged in, running in JBOD mode, since these are not RAID level drives, there is no reason to run them as a RAID. So my problem becomes as we all know Windows uses drive lettering, so having C-R can be rather annoying. (I got the bulk of these drives before the floods hit.)
Machine #2 is an AMD 1090t x6 with 32gb of DDR3-1333mhz RAM, it has currently a 120gb SSD (boot) 1 750gb, 2x1.5tb and 2x3tb drives. This also runs Windows Home Server 2012 but it has limitations. It will only use 8gb of ram, not the full amount, even though it will show it, it still refuses to even use it. I got the ram on sale from a place in town that had it returned a customer brought it back claiming it was faulty, I ran memtest on it for 72 hours and 0 errors so obviously the previous owner didn't get the exact match for his motherboard.
My goal is too create 2 separate box's, one will allow for a media center (the one with the most drives.) and the other as a backup server for all the other home computers that family uses, in case of a failure their data won't be lost.
The biggest questions I have are:
1. Would FreeNAS work with Machine #1 to create sort of a fakeraid (or possibly using the onboard) as a raid, even the RocketRaid card (which really isn't a true raid card.) to create not one single array but maybe 1 for the 6 internal drives, and 1 for each 5 bay sans digital. I wouldn't do RAID 5 because writing to them would be slow. Also which RAID level would be best for me to allow for speed and space. I'm really not worried about a drive going for parity.
2. Would FreeNAS work with Machine #2 to allow my family to create backup's of their PC's onto it that was say if their storage drives crashes and we get it replaced, we swap it out and can restore the data.
3. Can I create accounts on FreeNAS that would allow me to control what others in the house can access, have read/write privileges, or not see the share at all.
4. Even though Machine #1 does have a lot of drives, really combining them down would help a lot to just a few mounts. I know fake raids are not approved of but I have heard of people having success with them.
I'm trying to not spend anymore money unless I have too. the NTFS file system alone on larger drives is not playing well when you begin to fill those drives up. I know of EXT3/4 I have installed Fedora Linux before but it didn't play nice with that RocketRaid card. However they have built new drivers for it that would allow me to compile it with later versions. Apparently these units sold a lot and not everyone used Windows so they decided to go back and release updated drives.
Anyways, I figured I would ask, I have taken some time off my work due to Chronic Pain issues and until the doctor gets me in which will be a couple of months I have so much free time on my hand its really had me looking around.
I appreciate any feedback.
