Read tons of Info, the more I read the more questions I have.. help needed

[enaggi]

Hola!

Well the thing is that I've been reading all the info I could about making a NAS, the OS and other related stuff and now I have more questions than when I started..
After check pretty much all the hardware in the world:p I decided to buy this one:

- CPU --> INTEL Celeron G1610
- RAM --> Corsair Vengeance DD3 8GB
- Motherboard --> P8H77-I - ASUS
- PSU --> Corsair CX430M
- CASE --> Fractal Design NODE 304
- Sandisk SDCZ33 8GB where I will fit FreeNas.

It will serve movies and download torrent.. and thats it pretty much.

So, here we go, right now I have only one 2TB WD Green, Im gonna use the NAS just with one HDD (save some money right now) so my questions are:
- The HDD has 1TB with my stuff(movies and blablabla), if I start running FreeNas and setting it up, will all the stuff remain there or it will be deleted??
- Do I need to do any Raid right now??
- That motherboard supports 6 sata drives so Im planning to buy more in the future, can I just install the HDD inside it and that's it? My guess is I will need to do raid or use ZFS, I will loss data or not when doing it?

Thanks in advance

 

[hervon]

Your setup seems ok. FreeNAS uses either UFS (single drive) or ZFS filesystems. So you need to format the HDD in order to use it on FreeNAS. No RAID with only on drive. When you buy new HDDs, you can format them in UFS again to work with them individually but the best would be to format them all in RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2.

BTW RTFM!

 

[gpsguy]

BTW, UFS2 is not limited to a single drive. Volumes can include gmirror, gstripe, and graid3

ZFS adds additional features like quota, snapshots, datasets and more.

FreeNAS uses either UFS (single drive)

 

[joeschmuck]

Yea, you know I don't think you read that much in spite of the thread title. As for current drive, you didn't state the format your current drive was in, if it's other than UFS or ZFS then it will need to be reformatted. I would recommend you purchase all the drives you need up front so you can create your ZFS pool in a RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2, it will save you a lot of time later on transferring files around if you have a large amount. The choice is yours and really depends on how important your data is to you, mostly for recovery operations because you should be routinely backing up your important data to a different medium like DVDs or maybe another NAS.

Might I suggest the WD Red series of drives for your NAS solution.

Use this link to figure out how many drives you would need under a particular RAIDZ level, it takes the guess work out. I would recommend using 2TB drives vice 3TB drives due to resilvering takes less time on a smaller hard drive and should you choose RAIDZ1 this will be a warning you want to heed.

Read Cyberjock's guides and they will help you. He has a link in his tag line and you can find him posting all the time.

If you are going to serve movies via MiniDLNA, read my fix in my tag line. It's not required but it beats restarting the service all the time. And read the entire thread, there is great info in there depending on your circumstances.

 

[hervon]

BTW, UFS2 is not limited to a single drive. Volumes can include gmirror, gstripe, and graid3

ZFS adds additional features like quota, snapshots, datasets and more.

My bad. Thanks gpsguy for the correction.

 

[enaggi]

thanks guys, but Im gonna go for UnRaid. Cheers!