Single pint of failure? (starter PC)

[Frank Chibu]

Hi. I am new, I do IT, but am looking at FreeNAS for home use.. Pics, music and movies. I have an oldish P4 PC with 4 SATA interfaces. I am going to use 4 3TB WD RED drives in RAID5. Right now I have 4gb of RAM, may go to 8 but after initial data dump don't expect much CPU/RAM use.

My question is, after I get setup and happy... and want to upgrade hardware (not drives), can I attach these 4 drives to a new PC / NAS host? OR -if the PC dies and I have 4 good drives, can I reload them on a new host? I've read through a lot of material and posts and haven't found a clear answer.

 

[pirateghost]

Well, yes but if you have less than 8gb RAM, you're gonna have a bad time...

And I'm not really sure what you mean by raid 5...FreeNAS doesn't have RAID5

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS isn't for your old P4. It needs 8GB of RAM minimum, ECC RAM highly recommended, and server grade parts.

 

[Ericloewe]

You should really read the stickies. Otherwise, you will not enjoy the results.

 

[joelmusicman]

Then again, I don't think Windows is suitable for data that you care about either...

I was recently backing up some data to my FreeNAS server, and had some weird permissions issue and couldn't access my music directory on a local Windows hard drive. Tried taking ownership, but that didn't work either. Some Google-fu said check the drive for errors in the Administrative Tools, which I did and it fixed the "errors." Browsed to the folder again. This time, I accessed it just fine, but now it's empty instead of about 70GB of music that should be there. I think I already backed it up, but it was definitely eye-opening.