Neat stuff, but is it practical for my project goals?

[Themus]

Greetings,

I have a old PC I custom build years ago. I succeed in getting FreeNas to work on a thumb drive. Pretty cool. But as I dive into the manual, I have to ask myself and now others, is this going to be worth it?

See I keep reading about 8gb is the least amount of RAM. More is much better. I have 8gb now; but I can only go to 16 max on this MOBO. Also, that would require buying all new sticks of RAM. About $80.00 DDR3 10600u.

My goal is simple. I have three external WD 8tb easystore drives now used for backup of my media. I would shuck them and put all three in the FreeNas box and add a fourth so I could have some redundancy. My case will only hold about 4 drives comfortably. {Room for more but no space between them.}

I also my add FLEX server on it.

Is this worth the effort with the stipulated limitations?

 

[sretalla]

You'll probably get what you want from it if you're just wanting to share media with Plex (or did you mean Flex... something I don't know about).

Make sure you get the 4th drive in there before setting things up as you can't change the pool without a re-create operation.

 

[Themus]

Plex. Thank you. At this point my initial plans are for it to strictly be used to backup my media files that are on WD Mycloud units. Consolidate my 3 separate WD easy store units into basically one.

Do you think I am good with 8gb of RAM for this use? My plan is to shut it down when not doing backups.

My boss shared this morning this is a powerful tool. But he warned me as far as he knew, there was a weakness in getting drive alert failures. He said unless they improved it, a drive could fail and you wouldn’t know it

 

[mjt5282]

the current freenas has no trouble detecting and emailing the administrator about disk errors or issues. Just make sure your SMTP server is correctly configured. Make sure your S.M.A.R.T. tasks are scheduled and running and run weekly or monthly scrubs on the data. Neither will run if the server is turned off.

 

[garm]

My boss shared this morning this is a powerful tool. But he warned me as far as he knew, there was a weakness in getting drive alert failures. He said unless they improved it, a drive could fail and you wouldn’t know it

Please elaborate?

 

[Themus]

Please elaborate?

He was bragging on ZFS abilities. Then he just said he understood from various forums that when a drive died, you often found out too late. The alerts by email, etc we’re not reliable.

So is my current 8gb of ram going to be sufficient for my stated goal above or do you suggest I spent the extra money for 16gb of ram?

One of the things that drew me to FreeNas were all the YouTube videos bragging about how it functions so well with “discarded” hardware.

I have a buyer for this pc at $125. So I am trying to make a value judgement here too

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

He was bragging on ZFS abilities. Then he just said he understood from various forums that when a drive died, you often found out too late. The alerts by email, etc we’re not reliable.

In my experience this is not true. I've found that through the use of regular scrubs and SMART tests not only do I get reliable notifications via email if a drive outright fails; I also get reliable notification via email for any SMART test or scrub issues which might indicate that a failure is imminent.

What your boss may have read about were folks who did not have email notification set up properly or who did not have regular SMART tests and scrubs scheduled. It is common for folks to have bad experiences when they do not properly set up monitoring and treat the system as a set-it-and-forget-it for several years.

See I keep reading about 8gb is the least amount of RAM. More is much better. I have 8gb now; but I can only go to 16 max on this MOBO. Also, that would require buying all new sticks of RAM. About $80.00 DDR3 10600u.

FreeNAS likes ram because zfs likes ram. Rather than waiting on your slow disks to serve data when requested zfs tries to cache the most recently and most frequently used data in what is called the ARC; which is stored in ram. The more ram you have the more ARC you have. The more ARC you have the higher the likelihood that when you request a file from your FreeNAS machine that it is in the ARC and can be served quickly rather than having to wait for slower disks.

I use 8GB on my backup server because all it does it receive backup data from my primary server.

In your case, with a max memory of 16GB you should just be realistic. But 16GB in there and don't expect it to be able to run a bunch of VMs AND stream a bunch of videos via plex.

It would be helpful if you posted the full specs so folks can give you a better idea of the kind of performance you can expect. This way you can decide if you'd rather sell it or keep it.

 

[danb35]

One of the things that drew me to FreeNas were all the YouTube videos bragging about how it functions so well with “discarded” hardware.

Even in the old, pre-iX days, that wasn't really a design goal for FreeNAS, and it most definitely isn't now. It isn't a lightweight OS, and it has serious hardware requirements, mostly in the area of RAM (though really, it's 2019--8GB RAM minimum is not an onerous requirement), but also with respect to CPU and general hardware stability. Yes, you can use older hardware (my own system is 5+ years old, bought used via eBay), but it still needs to be suitable hardware.