Newbie here, needing some tips and others

[dcbasso]

Hello everyone, I'm N00b here, and I have some questions:

1. I have to create a NAS server, I'm seeing to buy a ATOM Dual Core 1.8ghz (D510), with Zotac Motherboard (ZOTAC NM10-B-E) and 4gb RAM (500gb Sata III 16mb). Well, I need to know if a PC with this configuration I can make a simple NAS Server, to handle files in a network with 4 pcs only, and have a good performance.

2. Another question, I can use the FreeNAS with a NTFS storage? The support to NTFS system is stable? And about the perfomance?

Thanks all.

 

[William Grzybowski]

1. Yes, lots of people use this configuration, your performance under Samba/Windows Share/CIFS won't be that good but works.. i'd guess 30-40MB/s

2. No, NTFS support sucks

 

[warri]

I'm running a very similar configuration, and you get speeds of 30-40 MB/s over CIFS like William said. SFTP is considerably slower with about 10 MB/s. The CIFS speed is sufficient to stream at least two Full HD-Streams simultaneously, and with other media there is absolutely no problem.
The advantage is a quiet system due to passive cooling and it doesn't need much power as well.

So you should be absolutely fine for a small network, although if you want to use encrypted data transfer or even encryption on the disk at a later point, when it is supported by FreeNAS, it will most likely be a performance-killer.