Hello,
Installed FreeNAS 11.2 RC1 on a Dell 2950 w/ perc5i, 24GB working ram, 4x 146GB SAS HDs and 2x 250GB SATA HDs (I know, power hog and noisy) that I bought off craigslist for cheap. Had some issues with 11.1 booting with GRUB and eventually gave up after numerous reinstalls, 11.2 is much much more stable so far. So far, I have bought a LSI 9211-8i and cables off eBay and successfully flashed the firmware using a bootable FreeDOS USB stick. Have yet to purchase drives for real data... sounds like WD Red is the way to go.
Debating whether long-term supermicro hardware from eBay is worth it, or if this is going to be stable enough - so far only about $200 into this but a fair amount of time configuring and figuring everything out. Medium term, thinking small business backup, with secondary backup to the cloud and maybe some VMs, but would definitely need different hardware for VMs as this hardware is incapable of supporting bhyve.
Installed FreeNAS 11.2 RC1 on a Dell 2950 w/ perc5i, 24GB working ram, 4x 146GB SAS HDs and 2x 250GB SATA HDs (I know, power hog and noisy) that I bought off craigslist for cheap. Had some issues with 11.1 booting with GRUB and eventually gave up after numerous reinstalls, 11.2 is much much more stable so far. So far, I have bought a LSI 9211-8i and cables off eBay and successfully flashed the firmware using a bootable FreeDOS USB stick. Have yet to purchase drives for real data... sounds like WD Red is the way to go.
Debating whether long-term supermicro hardware from eBay is worth it, or if this is going to be stable enough - so far only about $200 into this but a fair amount of time configuring and figuring everything out. Medium term, thinking small business backup, with secondary backup to the cloud and maybe some VMs, but would definitely need different hardware for VMs as this hardware is incapable of supporting bhyve.
