Multiple installation and setup questions 9.1

[Niccolo]

Hello,

first of all, I am totally new to anything besides Windows and do not have even basics of any other operating system.
My (very old) hardware looks like this:
2,5 Gb RAM (upgradable to 4 Gb, which I will do later)
1x500 Gb ATA (not SATA) drive
2x 1Tb SATA drives (recent purchase)

Following the documentation found here, I installed FreeNAS 9.1 with the following options:
1. System on the 500 Gb drive (because I could not make it boot from USB)
2. I combined the two SATA drives into a ZFS pool with RAID1. I wanted to have UFS volume (mostly due to my hardware limitations and due to the fact that I will not need the full array of what ZFS offers) but there was no option to choose it so I chose ZFS instead. So far, there is no data there, so RAM does not seem to be an issue.

I configured it all pretty much OK, with users, volumes, datasets, CIF shares. No data is there yet - still playing to see how it ends.

However, after extensive play with the BIOS, I found a way to boot it from USB. But after I do it, I face the following problems:
1. Can't use the 500 Gb drive for data storage (it is not seen in the GUI anywhere because it is a system disk)
2. For some reason only one of the SATA drives is present.

I would be grateful if you could help me with the following issues:

1. How do I regain control of the 500 Gb disk which is now used as system disk? I would like to use it for data. How can I format it or do something else so that it is not considered a system disk any more?
2. What could be the reason why I could not import UFS volume and only ZFS? I would like to re-try it.
3. What is the best configuration with the 3 disks? Ideally, I would like to have RAID1 with the two SATA disks, and the third disk (500 Gb) could be RAID0 or anything - I will use it for the data which has no archival value. Is that possible with these different disks?

As I said, I have no data on the disks yet, so I am willing to start everything from scratch in order to have it working from USB and with 3 disks for storage. However, the most important question rihgt now is how to free the 500 Gb disk .

Once again, I am totally new, so I can just follow instructions and do things on the GUI. If I need to do something with command line in shell - that has to be very well-written instructions
Thank you.

 

[cyberjock]

You should read the manual on FreeNAS at doc.freenas.org. You will find that your system does not meet the minimum system requirements. The minimum RAM is 8GB. What you are doing is dangerous since you don't have that minimum. Per the manual, you should either upgrade your hardware to meet the minimum requirements or find an alternate OS to use. NAS4Free allegedly works with less RAM so you might want to go there.

 

[Niccolo]

I have read the manual and think that my system is perfectly fine if I use UFS, I quote:

"If you only plan to use UFS you may be able to get by with as little as 2GB of RAM." As I said, I have 2,5 GB of RAM and plan to expand it to 4.

I do not think there are any other limitations, or have I missed something? My 2nd question above is exactly that - how can I get to import volumes as UFS (which I tried to do and failed).

 

[cyberjock]

UFS is on its way out for FreeNAS. 9.2.0 is due out in a week or two and after that it will be removed. So I'd highly recommend against starting to use UFS now as it's about to be removed. UFS also doesn't support jails so you'll have no plugins or jails available.

You might have better luck with 4GB of RAM with NAS4Free. Be warned it is not as polished as FreeNAS so you may have problems.

FreeNAS is an enterprise class product. As such, its not mean for those that want to repurpose old hardware despite the a**holes on Youtube that say it is.