QNAP forums left a bad taste

[Yorick]

> 3. how long do people with no experience take from building a nas to getting it up and running?

Define "no experience"? No experience with FreeNAS or no experience with Windows, Linux/BSD, networking? I'd say maybe a day or two if you need to look into what SMB is and such. Plex comes in really easily as a plugin. SMB sharing can be a little tricky because Samba has options. There are really good guides out there though. Don't expect your freenas to show up in File Explorer. You will be able to map a drive to it or get to it with \\name-of-freenas-server . That's a Win10 quirk.

> 5. anything i should know beforehand about freenas?

It uses ZFS. Consider your storage needs and drive layout carefully beforehand. You cannot extend a raidz. You can extend the pool it's in, by adding another raidz of the exact same size and type. raidz expansion (from 4 drives to 5, etc) will probably be an available feature in OpenZFS sometime 2019/2020, and in FreeNAS some time after that, after an extensive beta testing phase.

There are some good primers on ZFS on this site, I'd say read enough to consider your options. With 4 drives of 4TB each, a raidz1 seems reasonable. If you're worried a second drive might fail while you're replacing the first one that failed, make it raidz2 instead.

 

[Chris Moore]

I saw the case but I thought it was pretty big but maybe my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, how reliable is booting from usb stick also I saw that was recommended, I have 4 4TB sésgate hdd right now, and 2 4gb ddr3 ram and when I return the Qnap I’m planning on using that money for the build

The big problem with trying to make a system small is that it usually costs more. If you want cheap, the cheapest system that can actually do the job properly, is not going to be tiny. If you go tiny, the cheap system is not going to do the job properly and a tiny system that will do the job properly is certainly going to cost much more.

 

[NASbox]

I'd say @Chris Moore steered you right with that PowerEdge. Add two WD Red 4TB drives from eBay as a mirror and you're set. If you don't care whether the data dies on you, start with one drive, add a mirror later. WD Red 4TB go for as low as 85 bucks on eBay; with some diligence you may find them for even less.

It's not all-singing all-dancing but a LOT more powerful than that QNAP.

Great practical advice!

 

[pro lamer]

You could also use a pair of these USB drives (USB 2.0 on purpose) as boot media

Is it enough? Long story short: basing on my readings in our forums I am asking whether one using USB drives for boot also needs to stick to some older FreeNAS version? And which one?

Explanation: I've read recently some posts, in our forums, complaining on USB sticks. My impression is that these complains are more often than before. Someone mentioned that FreeNAS started writing more to the boot disk since some version (earlier than 11.2). But I'm not sure from the top of my head if the complains referred to 11.2x only...

OTOH I can imagine people running USB sticks successfully don't go to forum every week to praise USB sticks ;) so we may have more complains 'cos of more users ;) (do we have much more users recently? )

Finally USB sticks may be enough in the beginning until one saves some money for an SSD... Or learns if they work for him/her well... :/

Having said that, a single SSD (no need for a mirror) plus config backup is said to be enough.... And some people use small HDDs to boot (usually I guess if they had it already) (separate from data pools).

Sent from my phone

 

[danb35]

I am asking whether one using USB drives for boot also needs to stick to some older FreeNAS version? And which one?

FreeNAS' treatment of the boot device changed with 9.3. In 9.2 and earlier, the boot device was UFS, and the root filesystem was on a ramdisk created at boot. As a result, the boot device was only touched on boot, upgrade, or config changes. Starting with 9.3, the boot device became a live ZFS pool--and that's when the inadequacies of USB sticks as boot devices became much more apparent. So if you're wanting to stick to "some older" version, it will be very old.

If you keep config file backups and don't encrypt your pool, a boot device failure is at most an inconvenience. But it's an inconvenience that can be easily and inexpensively avoided--SSDs are cheap. If you have a spare SATA port, you really should be using one as a boot device.

 

[NASbox]

If you have a spare SATA port, you really should be using one as a boot device.

SO TRUE!