N00b with second hand NAS box

[YourITMan]

Afternoon All,

Helloooo.... I'm a noob here at FreeNAS but have been using HP MSA's, Symantec Huawei SAN's as well as QNAP boxes in the past.

I've just acquired an Iomega 200D NAS box from a customer who didn't want it anymore. Will be stripping it down to see the internal bits and bobs this week.

Its obviously a few years old, has 2 drives in there at the mo which are 160GB from memory, swappable and has expansion for maybe 3 or 4 disks total. Seems to have 256 or 512 RAM and a 2GZ processor, currently running Windows 2003 Appliance Server.

Should be a good project. :)

 

[matthewowen01]

not nearly enough ram for ZFS, you could use ufs though. good luck let us know how it goes.

 

[YourITMan]

I'm hoping the basic guts are a good base build. Upgrades are easy to come by so hopefully there is some scope for some serious RAM upgrade and physical disk increase.

 

[globus999]

My advice, if you really, and I mean *really* want to use FN for anything that is close to usable, forget FN8. Regardless of what it says in the welcome page, its real status is alpha at best. Go with FN7. Oh, btw, even for FN7 512 of RAM is quite low, if you attempt to use ZFS.

 

[Durkatlon]

512MB should be enough for ZFS if you tune kmem size and max parameters to 512MB in /boot/loader.conf. In fact for i386 installs of FreeNAS8, it never seems to use more than 512MB of RAM anyways. I think you need to build your own kernel if you want it to use more.

This has puzzled me for a while. I don't understand why the recommendation is to max out an i386 install with 4GB of RAM if you can never get the kernel to use any of it...