Minimum requirement jump?

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Hi! I read a guide recently, and have been interested in a DROBO for a while, but being pretty computer savvy, and not wanting to pay that overpriced tag, I decided to make my own.

Naturally after reading the guide and doing some research I came here! I was going to get a small MicroATX tower, and 4 drive bays. I have an older MicroATX motherboard, with a sempron LE-1100 processor. (Single core, 1900, hopefully enough to run FreeNas).

But I was hoping to get away with 1-2 gigs of memory, and booting from a USB stick. But FreeNas 7, to Freenas 8 has a huge jump in minimum specs. 6 gigs? Thats a ton, and I always figured for simple data pushing, that much memory would not be missing.

Am I missing something? Or to get this to work, am I going to need to put more money into it?

 

[ProtoSD]

If you don't use ZFS you can get away with less, say ~2GB, and with ZFS you should really have no less than 4GB, although it's not impossible to use less but not without consequences.

I just posted this earlier, but it doesn't seem to be read by enough people:

The FreeNAS™ 8 series represents an entire rewrite from the .7 series of FreeNAS™. In other words, FreeNAS™ was rewritten from scratch and features were added as the new base stabilized. This means that not every feature in the .7 series was re-implemented and some features that are not available in FreeNAS™ .7 are available in FreeNAS™ 8.x. Notable differences between the two implementations are as follows:

It's also being handled by a completely different set of developers.

 

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Ya I understand. Reworking from the ground up is amazing, and is awesome. My motherboard (since its older, and I was trying to do this project as cheaply as possible) supports 4 gigs MAX. I am worried I am going to build this thing, and its just not going to be able to push data around with FreeNas 8.

Thanks for your quick reply, any other input would be greatly appreciated, ive heard great things about FreeNas. Just worried its going to be to hardware intensive for what I need :(

So, ultimately, I want to have this visible to a Windows machine, and on the windows machine, I will probably have some torrent traffic going to and from it, and also setting up an encrypted FTP server that will push data to and from the server. Can I used UFS for this? Or is ZFS more preferable? From what I read 4 gigs of memory using ZFS may cause me some issues? I plan on using 4 - 2TB hard drives

Any help will be great! I am getting excited though and hope I can get a working solution thats not going to break my wallet

 

[jgreco]

You can get by just fine with 1GB if you're using UFS. It's ZFS that's the pig. FreeNAS on a 1GB VM serving iSCSI off an SSD is lightning fast.

 

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Thanks for the reply!

Could someone explain to me the advantages of running a ads system over a it's one? After looking through my option I can always just use freenas 7 too, which sounds like it might be a reasonable option too

 

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Update

Posting an update....

After some research and reading, and posts, I decided I am going to stick with FreeNas 0.7

If need be, I can upgrade my memory to 4 gigs, and try FN 8, but I would really like the build to cost the least as much as I can possibly make it.

I also am really interested in ZFS, and ive heard of people running it just fine with 1 gig of memory running FreeNas 0.7. So thanks for all your support! But im heading over to the 0.7 Legacy forums, hopefully I can get my minimal system up and running efficiently.