Options for a 2 drive bay PC + Freenas ?

[Jerzy Bulovski]

Hi,

I'm new here so be gentle!

I have a HP SFF machine that I currently dual boot with Windows 7 and OpenElec for Kodi. It has a 256GB HDD and a 2TB HDD in it. (Kodi boots from a USB flash drive)

I would like to use it as a NAS but wondered what my options are. I had thought that I could perhaps put two 4TB drives into this PC and then hardware raid it + share a folder for storage but that's all a bit nasty.

Then I wondered whether I could put two 4TB drives in it and :

a. Make a small-ish partition of 500GB on one drive and move Windows 7 to it for booting.
b. Create two partitions on the two drives of, say 3.5TB each. Have the remaining 500GB for data storage
c. Put Freenas on a headless virtual machine running on the Windows 7 installation that can mount the two x 3.5TB partitions (RAID) and I can use this for the NAS.

Is this sort of thing advisable?
If there was a catastrophic failure the windows-supporting HDD, would I be able to read the remaining HDD with anything to get at the data on the 3.5TB partition?

Thanks for any comments /pointers.

Thanks,
J

 

[Bidule0hm]

"c. Put Freenas on a headless virtual machine running on the Windows 7 installation that can mount the two x 3.5TB partitions (RAID) and I can use this for the NAS." this is the worst idea ever.

The hardware is far from the minimum requirements for FreeNAS. Look at the hardware recommendations (link is in my sig).

It's not recommended at all to use FreeNAS in a VM (except for doing some testing before using a real system). More info can be found here ;)

FreeNAS uses ZFS and ZFS needs a direct access to the drives. Plus you can't mount NTFS or whatever other filesystem on FreeNAS, ZFS only (except for importing a disk but it's not what you want here).