Yorick
Wizard
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2018
- Messages
- 1,912
> 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.
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.