My Official POS FreeNAS Project - Start To Finish!

[voodoojaron]

Hi Everyone -

New to FreeNAS and new to the forum as well. I am mostly a Mac guy, so it is the intricacies of the Windows hardware world that you guys can help me with.

System:

Gateway GP7-450
450 MHZ CPU
128 MB RAM
No hard disk
OEM video card
OEM CD-ROM
OEM Floppy Disk
Zip Disk 100 Drive

The project is to be a fully functional FreeNAS backup server to my RAID array which contains digitized versions of all of my burned DVD backups. No streaming, no music, nothing else right now.

The BIOS version right now has already been upgraded to Phoenix 4W4SB0X0.15A.0019.P14.

Had some problems with the machine starting up, but reset the CMOS and all is well for now. This project is how to turn an inherited old (1998 running Windows 98SE) into a fully functional and reliable NAS device using the FreeNAS software and the gifts, talents, and advice of all of you fine folks.

1st problem: The machine WILL boot from a floppy disk with the BIOS update and WILL boot from both the Windows 98SE install CD and Windows XP install CD via the optical drive. Under no circumstance will the machine boot a copy of FreeNAS (tried both version 7 and 8.3.1) via optical drive or via USB thumb drive. The intent is to have an embedded copy under the IDE/ATA bus be the FreeNAS drive, with a SATA card added later for the larger storage drives.

Also, please - this IS the noob section, so be gentle and fully explain everything, if not for me than for others following this thread. The goal is to spend NO money or very, very little money. Repurposing is our goal here to prevent good PC's from going into the garbage.

Help and let's have fun!

 

[titan_rw]

Your machine is WAY too old to work with freenas. Even machines from ~2005 eta typically don't have enough ram. Even for a UFS only freenas install, I think you need a minimum of 2 gig ram. You've got 1/16 of that. Plus that cpu is so old, I'm not sure the freebsd kernel would boot on it. You'll need to find some newer hardware.

 

[pirateghost]

There is ZERO chance of you getting a properly working FreeNAS system on that thing. Perhaps you should start with the documentation on FreeNAS and look at the minimum/recommended hardware specs....you will find that machine to be about 10 years too old for the task

 

[jgreco]

FreeNAS won't work on your system. It is fundamentally geared towards more recent systems that are large enough to run ZFS, and even if you choose not to use ZFS, FreeNAS still assumes plenty of resources are available. However, you may be able to find another product that can work with that. You may also want to cruise eBay to find more memory to max out what you have. Crucial says it maxxes out at 384MB however and that simply isn't a very large system. You may want to check out NAS4Free or Openfiler to see if you can squeeze by their hardware requirements.

 

[voodoojaron]

When I ordered more RAM for my machine, I ordered 2 x 128 sticks to max out the memory to 384 MB. The kind folks at Black Diamond Memory, however, gave me a free upgrade to 2 x 256 MB.

It wasn't very much money, so I decided to pop them in and see if they worked and got recognized. They did - so the memory now is 640MB and in theory could go up to 756MB if I purchased another 256MB stick to replace the 128 that came with the machine.

What if I ordered a T-slot CPU upgrade to 1.4Ghz Celeron?

Perhaps I should just max the memory, buy a SATA controller and use Ubuntu as my server instead, particularly because I don't need redundancy? Lemme know.

VJ

 

[jgreco]

Up to you. Once you get in that neighborhood, you probably have more options.