Some basic questions :)

[Torleif]

Hi
I am new to freenas. I have some linux experience, but limited BSD knowlage.

I have a old pentium 4 desktop with 4 drives in it.
I wish to set a NAS.

1: I see it is recommended to run freenas from a usb stick. but how is the speed from usb compared to a hard drive? Is the only reason for not installing on a had drive because it takes the whole drive?

2: I dont plan on having raid, just a simple setup with 4 seperate drives. Can I share one drive with different protocols (NFS and SMB) at the same time? and/or can I just make a folders on a drive and share the different folders with different protocols and so on?

3: The 4 drives I plan to use is already formatted as ext3 and lots of data on them. Do I have to format them or can I use them as they are? If I plan to format to ZSF, what is the best way of transfering old data to another source before transfering it back to freenas? (FTP to an external drive connected to another computer?)

4: I my hardware collapses and I have to take out the drives, what can I use to read ZSF from eks. a windows machine?

5: I use a Android phone and would like to achive like a network cloud like dropbox/google-drive for simplicity, Is this possible with freenas?

6: At work I use windows at home I use linux and XBMC and outside my home I use Android and somtimes Ipad. What is the best share protocol for this invironment?
Can I share different folder on one drive with different protocols (ref. question 2)

7: I see alot of of the "out of the box" NAS solutions like Netgear ReadyNAS Duo V2 uses DLNA. Is this supported in freenas? I dont know a lot about this protocol.

8: I also read about Openmediavault, how is this compared to Freenas?


Thanks for all help :)

 

[ben]

1. The USB stick is rarely if ever touched by the OS; most of the OS is loaded into RAM. Therefore, speed is pretty much irrelevant.

2. That's a dangerous choice, but if you are fine with it: Yes, through the method you described in the following point you can share data from the same drive over multiple protocols.

3. ext3 is not fully supported in FreeNAS. If you're not planning yo use RAID of any kind, you might as well use UFS instead of ZFS and save your system from the memory gobbling nature of ZFS. Any file transfer method you like is suitable if you have external places to put the data, including any sharing protocol FreeNAS supports or FTP.

4. Assuming the drives are intact and the filesystems are not corrupt, a brand new FreeNAS install or any FreeBSD install of 8.3 or later is perfectly capable of importing and retrieving the filesystems created by FreeNAS.

5. Search the forums on this, it's a complex question and many have come up with ideas for it already.

6. For ONE share to be accessible everywhere? I have no idea what protocols Android and iOS support, but NFS and CIFS tend to be "accepted everywhere" otherwise - it all depends what you're actually trying and able to do.

7. FreeNAS has a MiniDLNA plugin.

8. OpenMediaVault is a project by a former FreeNAS developer with roughly the same goals in mind, but based on a Debian Linux platform instead of FreeBSD. I suggest you read up on it separately and compare its features and FreeNAS' in terms of what YOU actually need.

Please read the FAQ as well: http://forums.freenas.org/faq.php

 

[JaimieV]

Additional for 4: Assuming as above, you can connect your ZFS array to another machine and boot that machine off either the original or a freshly prepared FreeNAS USB stick. I'm sure this is what Ben means, but wanted to make it obvious.

 

[Torleif]

Thanks for all help :)
I guess I have to go for UFS since I dont have more than 3 gig ram.
Can I go for ZFS and later upgrade to more RAM ?

Also, I have a pentium 4 prcessor with intel motherboard. I do have Gigabit ethernet. Does freenas require a lot of power ? Will I loose much speed with this "old" harware is basically my question.?

 

[cyberjock]

We recommend that you not use ZFS with less than 4GB of ram if you're worried about performance and stability. If you want to upgrade later, you should wait to use ZFS later.

 

[ben]

It's more likely that the speed of your disks will limit your performance. Old hardware like that could slow you down, though, and would make ZFS even more of a bad idea. There is no reason for you to use ZFS anyway, since you're not planning to use any kind of RAID protection (still a bad idea, by the way).

 

[cyberjock]

Old hardware using ZFS with less than recommended RAM and you aren't using RAID protection.

Even if you want to experiment I'd still recommend you do a VM. Then at least you could use ZFS to create a protected array and simulate hard drive failures, etc. There's just not much to "learn" with the system you are planning to use.

 

[Torleif]

Thanks all :)

Hehe, yes it is poorly planned! It is this way I learn :)
The situasjon is:
I have been running a debian stable machine for years as a server for mail (postfix) a fileserver and some other things.
Lately I have gone over to google apps for mail. So basically I only use the server as a file server and shares over NFS.
So I was thinking of buying a ReadyNAS Duo v2, but since I already have a machine, why not use it :) I also enjoy learning about the setup :)
It seems like the hardware on the Netgear Marvell ARM CPU, 256MB DDR3 SODIMM is not very strong, so a pentuim 4 machine should do?

I understand I should use UFS and I will.
The Raid thing I dont know much about, but it includes all the disks are seen as one big disk?
I have 4 hard drives (Old) 300G, 500G, 500G, 1000G. I want to replace some of the disks soon, and how is that if they are in a raid?
Also I use a lot of different clients, so maybe one disk share over SMB and one over NFS and so on.

I am unexperienced, and that is why I am in here :) I want to learn by trying and failing :)

The support on this forum has been great so far, Thanks :)