Hello Internet People

[mjbcomputers]

Sup guys, never ran freenas before, had a netgear NAS in the past at my old job, worked pretty good for what we used it for. I have since went off on my own and opened my own shop. Looking to build a freenas server, but not just some "good enough" server. I want scalability. I ran into walls all the time with that netgear NAS. Space issues, and also transfer issues. See when a client bring in a system, I image that system threw a bootable environment with acronis via the network to a NAS. So i am looking to do a build with dual gigabit network cards. I wired my shop with all Cat 6 cabling. Everything is on gigabit switches.

I thought about doing a hypervisor like xen server and isntalling freenas on it, but i found an article on here, i seen it can be done but has its headaches and figured forget that.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

i am looking to do a build with dual gigabit network cards

What do you hope to gain from having dual NICs? If the answer is "network performance", you're on the wrong path, because that only helps with multiple clients, and it sounds like this will be just you.

I want scalability. I ran into walls all the time with that netgear NAS. Space issues, and also transfer issues.

Avoiding space issues means building something with lots of bays, or the ability to attach more. If "transfer issues" means read/write performance, it's about things like buying quality gear, not going too wide with vdevs, testing with real workloads, but in general, it's not that hard to saturate gigabit ethernet with FreeNAS on large transfers. If 800Mbps isn't fast enough, you need to consider 10Gbit ethernet or something along those lines.