Hey there, I've been using FreeNAS for a few years now (started in mid 2013). Initially it was with some used consumer grade gear as I didn't have used enterprise gear on my buying radar at the time. After getting into buying some old IBM M1015/Dell H200/LSI 9211 cards & quad 1Gb Intel NIC cards for very cheap I started to browse for gear made by SuperMicro. Eventually I upgrade from my AMD FX-8120 with 32GB of unbuffered ECC on a test bench setup having all the drives carefully balanced in the open air to a single socket LGA 1156 SuperMicro X8S platform inside a SC833 15x 3.5" bay chassis. Got a dual socket LGA 1366 SM X8D setup for work when we needed a better solution that a corrupt 4-Bay Netgear NAS. We also needed a VMWare ESXi server for testing & a new network platform all around the same time. After researching, buying & fully configuring everything - I was bit by enterprise gear bug! After going for bore into ESXi, virtualizing FreeNAS & pFsense (so fully BSD based ironically) with everything setup in a few days I then started buying some similar gear for my house. Eventually I really needed 10Gb connection, came across a few postings on Quanta switches - bought a LB4M, 10Gb SPF+ card & Twinax DAC cables for very cheap and it all installed quite easily. Eventually came across some Dell PowerConnect 55xx series switches, "remnant" spools of fiber cabling & fiber termination kits for crazy cheap prices along with a few 40+ U racks locally I'm pretty satisfied. As LGA2011 gear passes the 5 year old mark, some old Nvidia GRID cards & Oracle/Sun Fxx SSD cards selling for cheap I've begun buy them to test a few more things I would like to try for fun and knowledge.
So my theme - cheap, old enterprise grade that is reliable & did I mention cheap.
Now I have to figure out how to do those signature boxes that hide/show your builds/network gear.
Edit: Thank you Tigersharke for the tip! My signature will evolve to reflect my gear.
So my theme - cheap, old enterprise grade that is reliable & did I mention cheap.
Now I have to figure out how to do those signature boxes that hide/show your builds/network gear.
Edit: Thank you Tigersharke for the tip! My signature will evolve to reflect my gear.
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