Installing FreeNAS on dual 64 GB hard drives

[Palladini]

I am setting up a NAS, I am going to (already downloaded the ISO Image) to burn that to a 8 GB Thumb Drive. I plan to install that on 2 64 GB Thumb Drives, that I will have plugged in at back of the Motherboard.

Now my question is, when I install this ISO Image, how to I install to dual drives?

 

[garm]

http://doc.freenas.org/11/install.html#performing-the-installation

 

[Palladini]

I have ordered all the stuff I need, I have a working Computer, just no hard drive for an OS. I have ordered off of Ebay 2 64 GB USB Thumb Drives, 2 Fans, a fan controller. and 3 1 TB hard drives The Motherboard is an Asus Board with an I5 Intel CPU, and I have a card mounted on the motherboard expansion board that gives me 8 SATA ports and the power available to run 8 drives, along with 6 SATA ports on the motherboard now. I have the wires needed to add more SATA power if needed. That brings up another question, if I put 3 2 TB drives in the machine to start, can add more 2 TB drives at a later date with no serious repercussions?

 

[Palladini]

If the Thumb Drives I have ordered get here first, Can I install FreeNAS on these, when done installing and restarting, shut it down and wait for the drives?

 

[gpsguy]

Yes

 

[gpsguy]

That brings up another question, if I put 3 2 TB drives in the machine to start, can add more 2 TB drives at a later date with no serious repercussions?

yes and no.

While one can extend a volume by adding drives in new vdev's in the future, you can't change the width of a RAIDzX after the fact. For example if you had a 3 disk RAIDz1 volume, you can't add additional disks into that vdev. You could stripe anothe 3 disk RAIDz1 vdev to it, to extend the volume.

If you started with 2 disks in a mirror, you could extend the volume by adding another mirror.

For general purposes we recommend using RAIDz2 volumes. It's best to wait until you have all the drives you plan to use in a vdev, to minimize the overhead devoted to parity.

 

[Palladini]

OK, Thanks! All we plan on doing here is storing Pictures, Videos I have shot and edited, maybe some PDFs, no Movies or huge files. The wife's Phone is full of Pictures, building this mostly to free up space on her cell phone. I imagine she will want her daughters wedding pics put in the folder I create for her. I will also have to teach how to access her folder, as on a computer literacy teast, she would 4 and I would score a good 12 or better. I have built from scratch several computers, fixed a few, and have done multiple reinstall of the OS in other peoples computers. I think I will order anther 2 2 TB drives for this NAS and have 5 disks in it.