Hello from UK - Building a small system

[georgep56]

Hi everyone.

I'm new to the whole NAS thing although having worked in IT for [too] many years I do have a lot of experience and I've already spent some time looking at the various NAS software that is around.

I've now settled on FreeNAS and I've already put together a very basic system using some spare hardware that I had lying around just to get a feel of what FreeNAS can do. It's an ageing ASUS ION AT5NM10E box with a single 3.5" 500GB data drive and a 2.5" 120GB(!) boot drive and its maximum 4GB of RAM.

I've already played around with jails and have an 'old' jail (set up in the legacy gui) running dnsmasq/dnscrypt-proxy DHCP and DNS for my home network plus an iocage jail running Nextcloud which I just got up and running late last night.

I'm pretty much up against the limits of my hardware already so I need to design a new system, and having read some of the posts on here I now realise that a lot of people have "home" systems which are much bigger than the kind of thing that I was looking after 10 years or so ago in an office of 1000+ people !!!

Size, quietness and power consumption will be my main requirements as it will be sitting in my lounge under the TV! I would also like to look at running MythTV (my absolute favourite PVR system) with its associated DVB-S2 cards in another jail once I get a better system up & running.

I'm sure I'll be able to pick up a lot of useful stuff here but if anyone would like to 'chip in' with any suggestions or personal experiences that would be just great.

Thanks guys!
George

 

[Redcoat]

Hi there, welcome to the forums!

In the Resource section on the masthead you'll find this https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/ and lots of other good info that would be good reading for you before you start asking questions.

Here's a reference to a relatively compact build that will give you some pointers, and here's one to a build which I would likely emulate if I were to build a server from scratch (my most likely choice today would be to buy another retired server as I did with my backup Dell - best bang for buck - but it couldn't sit under my TV in the living room ...).

Come back and ask more questions with a more concise spec and budget in your hands and you'll get lots of help.

 

[georgep56]

Thanks very much @Redcoat - there's lots of really useful information there!