Hi party people,
i known im asking in the freenas forum so answers will naturally be a little biased but ill give it a shot.
im currently running a Synology DS214+ as my main storage system for pictures and movies, the movies are streamed within the network currently in native resolution but getting transcoding would not be a bad idea.
From time to time i also stream stuff from my server to the internet so things like a VPN server are also important to me.
now im running out of space and currently i only have one 3TB drive in my system as i couldnt afford more when i started out and im considering different solutions.
First the easiest solution but ill get less for the money is buying the new DS918+ getting some more drives and im done, totally painless but beside a little more power and some drivebays im not gaining much.
this is where FreeNAS comes into consideration i put together this config and it comes out to almost exactly the same price as the Synology system but obviously has much more power under the hood.
My only problem so far is the software, i want something that just works, set it and forget it and it will do everything i want.
Also i would like to combine multiple drives of different sizes to avoid having drives left over that have no use.
i tried installing FreeNAS on an older core i3 system that i used for some small server applications like running a minecraft server but even the installation was a pain in the ass and its still not even booting as it just gets stuck at some point.
This made me question if FreeNAS is stable an versatile enough because i may be able to troubleshoot some stuff but for my fiance everything just needs to work, she will not fiddle around with that stuff.
So is FreeNAS the right thing for me here? especially combining different sized disks seems to be a problem and right now im not that confident about reliability and ease of use.
By the way if i go for the system i posted above i also want to use it for VM´s and get rid of my i3 system so the FreeNAS box would also need to run a Windows VM with a small game server here and there, transcoding 4k videos would also be a big plus.
i known im asking in the freenas forum so answers will naturally be a little biased but ill give it a shot.
im currently running a Synology DS214+ as my main storage system for pictures and movies, the movies are streamed within the network currently in native resolution but getting transcoding would not be a bad idea.
From time to time i also stream stuff from my server to the internet so things like a VPN server are also important to me.
now im running out of space and currently i only have one 3TB drive in my system as i couldnt afford more when i started out and im considering different solutions.
First the easiest solution but ill get less for the money is buying the new DS918+ getting some more drives and im done, totally painless but beside a little more power and some drivebays im not gaining much.
this is where FreeNAS comes into consideration i put together this config and it comes out to almost exactly the same price as the Synology system but obviously has much more power under the hood.
My only problem so far is the software, i want something that just works, set it and forget it and it will do everything i want.
Also i would like to combine multiple drives of different sizes to avoid having drives left over that have no use.
i tried installing FreeNAS on an older core i3 system that i used for some small server applications like running a minecraft server but even the installation was a pain in the ass and its still not even booting as it just gets stuck at some point.
This made me question if FreeNAS is stable an versatile enough because i may be able to troubleshoot some stuff but for my fiance everything just needs to work, she will not fiddle around with that stuff.
So is FreeNAS the right thing for me here? especially combining different sized disks seems to be a problem and right now im not that confident about reliability and ease of use.
By the way if i go for the system i posted above i also want to use it for VM´s and get rid of my i3 system so the FreeNAS box would also need to run a Windows VM with a small game server here and there, transcoding 4k videos would also be a big plus.