Is Freenas a good option for me?

[malibumike]

Hello,

I'm on the fence on whether I should build a Freenas, and have some questions on if it's worth the cost of building, or If I should go another route. Here are my primary uses:

1) I want a JBOD setup, where I can start with a 3tb wd red drive, and when that fills up..I just plop in another. (redundancy is not important to me).

2) Stream hd video, music and photos to WDTV Live

I can currently do this now via Cisco's EA4500 router and a usb drive. But, I have problems when copying files to the drive through the network. They don't always show up immediatley, I sometimes need to unmount the drive from the router, and then re-mount it....that's a pain (though, If this could be fixed, I would be ok with that). I've also been using Windows shares for my music but I don't like having my main PC on all the time. So I'm thinking I'd like a single storage unit, I can leave on all the time, and have my entire collection of everything on it. What do you guys think? Is it worth the money to build a freenas for me, or should I just invest in more storage for my main PC, and continue streaming that way?..

 

[toddos]

Based on this:

1) I want a JBOD setup, where I can start with a 3tb wd red drive, and when that fills up..I just plop in another. (redundancy is not important to me).

FreeNAS is not a good fit for you.

 

[JaimieV]

What you say you want is Not A Good Plan. Neither JBOD *or* lack of redundancy.

I'll take a guess that since you want to put movies and music on it, you have all the DVD's/BD/CDs and can just re-rip if the single 3Tb HD dies? You should consider how long that'll take, and how much electricity you'll be paying for to do it all again... Took me over six weeks to do just my CD collection, back in the day.

 

[jgreco]

Assuming that he knows the risk of no redundancy, that doesn't make FreeNAS a bad fit. However, I *will* stress that if you're going to spend, let's say $300 on a system for FreeNAS (a cheap build admittedly), and another $130 on a 3TB HDD, you're already at $430. You're also committing to spending electricity etc to run the system. It seems like - in JaimieV's words - NOT A GOOD PLAN - to not just spend $560 and not have to worry about a single hard drive going south and taking all your data with it.

On the other hand, if you have an alternate backup plan that's reasonable, well, then... I still think the redundancy is a much better idea.

 

[JaimieV]

I should probably make a sig with that!

 

[jgreco]

Have at it, they were great words.