New To FreeNAS

[Bloodscrap]

Hi all
I have just stumbled across FreeNAS having taken a look at UNRaid and WHS over the past few days. It all started because I was going to buy a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo and then I thought about it for a while and thought well what if the PSU or the mainboard died in the future.

So I started looking at other ways of putting together a NAS machine. Because I have been working with PC's for the past 21yrs I have plenty of old parts and quickly assembled a couple of old hard drives on an old ABit AB9 Pro and started looking. I stumbled across UNRAID and decided to give it a try, it worked fine first time so I thought ok what other options are there.

So I read a few forum posts from various places on the net and came across people mentioning FreeNAS so I did a search and it led me here. When I got to the main page I took a look at the comparisons between Ver7 and 8 only to realise that all the stuff I want is not in FreeNAS8 yet it was in FreeNAS 7...... So I am a little perplexed, why isnt FReeNAS 7 still available? and why doesnt FreeNAS 8 have the wide number of features 7 had?

Also I was really puzzled at how much the hardware requirements have changed between 7 and 8 its a huge jump!!! Why is this? I am going to buy an AMD E350 board with 4GB ram for the NAS but judging by the specs for version 8 even that is not quite sufficient!!

I think I would stick with the lower version to be honest but I cant find it on here, can someone point me in the right direction.

Thanks

 

[audix]

The reason for the huge changes is that the version 8 is a complete rewrite (if I have understod it correctly). It will get all the old features but it will take some time.

You can find version 7 here http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-7-Stable/

 

[Tekkie]

There is a good thread on the E350 here: http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?27-AMD-E-350-Thread-(now-in-new-forum-)

 

[Bloodscrap]

Thanks guys much appreciated, I see now about version 8 its basically too new and so therefore doesnt have the features of 7 as of yet, its interesting to read about the E350 too, I was personally thinking of the MSI board E350IS-E45 mainly because of the cost altho there are 2 versions and one is 30 euros less than the other and the only difference I can see is USB3.0 and a bigger heatsink, I am however concerned about teh noise level of the fan on the cheaper version.

 

[Bohs Hansen]

that's the same reason i went for the ASUS E35M1-I deluxe, the passive cooling of the entire board was the selling point here compared to the competition. One of the most expensive of the e350 boards, but it was worth it for me.

 

[Tekkie]

Although I didn't go down the road of E350 I did get a Athlon II 415e (triple core 45W) which can be cooled passively fairly easily on an ASUS motherboard with 6SATA ports.

 

[jgreco]

The jump in hardware requirements is mostly the fault of ZFS, which uses insane amounts of memory but offers lots of flexibility. You can probably drop a ton if you go to standard UFS. Many of us have been serving files on FreeBSD since the days of the 386.

Generally speaking, a decade ago it would have been unthinkable to consider 8GB of memory for a NFS server except perhaps in the most extreme environments; a decade before that, a machine with 64MB had a fairly large amount of memory and was a heavy duty fileserver. What's reasonable keeps going up. ZFS is maybe 5-10 years before its time in its memory consumption, but sooner or later it'll just seem normal.

 

[Bloodscrap]

Ah that kind of explains it, Im pretty new to linux and instead stuck with windows Ive only ever used the same commands on the old unix machines at uni and that was over 10yrs ago now so remembering everything has started a steep learning curve lol I remember very well the days of the 086 286 and 386 lol but I never even contemplated serving anything those days lol

Im not too bothered about the heatsink as such because its going in a midi tower case, one of the decent old ones that was actually made out of alu all over and not as they are now alu at the front and crappy steel everywhere else. I looked at the ASUS and thought about the Pro but it is just far too expensive for the money I want to spend on it, Ill probably look for a replacement heatsink for it if I have any problems :)

The thing that concerns me is that MSi dont list a compatible memory list so I have decided to get 2x4GB Geil Value plus 1600 as I have no idea what will work on it properly. Anyone got any ideas before I order it?

Thanks :)