spare tower and questions

[turtle]

hello all,

below are the specs to the windows tower i was previously using as the centerpiece to my htpc. i replaced it with a mac mini so now its hanging in the corner unused. i realize the specs are a bit much for this application but since i own it, not using it, and it has plenty of expansion i figure if it works good for me.

heres what im attempting:

1. id like to leave the main drive intact and excluded from freenas so as to be able to boot into windows periodically, is this possible?

2. id like to remove the 2x2tb hard drives from their factory enclosures and throw them into this server setup. will i lose the data on these drives even if im just looking for raw storage and not backups mirroring or raid?

3. id likee to reduce the power consumption as much as possible. any tips in this regard?

thanks,

turtle

Motherboard
H-RS880-uATX (Aloe)
Processor
AMD Phenom II X4 945
Memory
8 GB
Video graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT220
Integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics
LAN: Gigabit 10-Base-GT
802.11 Wireless a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 card
Hard drive
1 TB
CD/DVD disc drive
SuperMulti DVD Burner with LightScribe Technology drive
Memory Card Reader
15-in-1 multimedia card reader
Computer Case
Mid-size ATX
Power Supply
350W

 

[marcusmarcus]

3. Unplug everything from the PC that you don't need for FreeNAS. Like the Graphics card, wireless card, cd/dvd drive, memory card reader. You may need them if you want to dual boot them in Windows though but the less you have plugged in the less there is to draw power.

 

[BakCompat]

well, if you want to dual boot between FreeNAS and Windows, you can certainly do so, but you will need to read up on partition management and bootloader setup. I suspect though, that a better option for you, is to keep that box set up as windows, and set up a virtual machine running FreeNAS. The cpu and ram are sufficient for this. Additional ram would be beneficial for advanced ZFS features, but you could dedicate 4 gigs of the host to the VM.

The benefit here is that you would always have the Windows box running, as well as the FN8 box running concurrently. No reboot required. You could accomplish this for free using VMWare Server. You could also try alternative VM apps if you wish.

 

[ProtoSD]

You don't even need to mess with a bootloader. Just change the boot order in your BIOS so it boots from USB first, and when you want to use Windows, just unplug your USB flash drive. Windows will probably complain about the disks not being formatted and want to format them for you, just make sure you don't do anything with your NAS disks while in Windows.

 

[BakCompat]

ach! I didn't even think of that. Yeah, you can do that too. It saves you some hassle on the software side and just requires you to (possibly) change the boot order of your devices in BIOS...

 

[marcusmarcus]

Some motherboards also let you hit a certain key when booting to bring up a boot menu to select what device you want to boot from, then you would not even need to remove the USB drive.

 

[turtle]

@protosd, thats exactly what i was hoping for. does anyone know the answer to #2? id hate to. format 4+tb

 

[ProtoSD]

How are your existing drives that you want to use for raw storage formatted?
Probably starting in beta 5 you'll be able to import NTFS, FAT, Ext2, but I'm not sure if that includes write support.

 

[BakCompat]

#2: if those 2 drives are individually formatted then there would be no issue importing. You will have to mount them manually from command line rather than using the GUI though. If they are set up in Windows as RAID0 or RAID1, then you will need to offload that data elsewhere, insert the drives into FreeNAS, format the drives UFS or ZFS and set them up, then xfer the old data back to them.

NTFS read-write access is not native to FreeNAS. You can mount NTFS disks read only and copy data over to a UFS or ZFS disk, but hat would be via command line, not GUI. The current iteration will "lose" that manual mount point after a reboot. As protosd mentions, FN 8.0.1 beta5 will likely allow importing of NTFS drives via gui, but understand that is read only. WRITE access to NTFS drives has always been spotty under non-Windows OSes. There are posts here already on manually mounting NTFS drives to copy data over if you wish to do that.

 

[turtle]

actually, in order to get them up and running on the mac mini, they are formatted for it. hfs extended?

 

[ProtoSD]

Sorry, but you're SOL.... you can't mount Mac formatted (hfs/hfs+) disks on FreeBSD based systems.

 

[turtle]

thanks for the help. ive moved everything around with some spare space. im walking away from freenas for now, seems to be impass after impass. im thinking whs is better sted for what im trying. extended drives and no data loss in setup. thx again

 

[survive]

Hi turtle,

I think you are still going to run into problems because Windows won't read HFS volumes without 3rd-party software either. I gotta tell you that if you took the plunge and set up a FreeNAS box with your 945 you should have a really fast system.

-Will

 

[turtle]

@will the hfs isnt an issue anymore. i moved the files around and reformatted.



my goal is to find a server setup where i can take the 2x2tb and 2x1tb drives and pool them without reformatting again. they are all ntfs now with my files intact. the original whs seems to do this, but i cant find it to buy/download anywhere. 2011 removed the drive extender. if this is at all possible with anything you guys know of please pass it on.

 

[bwhitson]

I am new to FreeNAS but I have lots of experience with WHS. (BTW the H stands for HELL!!!!! because you'd rather be there than work with that OS).

WHS is bloated with all manner of overhead. Yes 2011 they removed the drive extender - thanks microshaft dev team.
I do not think you are going to get out of copying all your data over and reformatting those drives.

BTW I have FreeNAS running on an old SLOT 1 300MHZ machine with a PCI SATA card and it only took like 8 min to completely format both of my 1tb drives.