Testing the waters before retiring my Lenovo ix2

[Markess]

My Lenovo ix2 hasn't given me any problems, but its "either its up or its dead" nature gives me cause for concern.

Before I invest in $erious hardware and commit my data though, I thought I'd assemble a "test rig" to get some experience with FreeNAS first. My "spare parts box" has what I need to meet minimum requirements, although I'm not sure if the 1.6 Ghz CPU I have is up to the things I want to try?

I use my NAS to store backups for the household's collection of Windows and Linux PCs, some media streaming (no transcoding), and some long term file storage. There's usually only one user active at a time.

Because its just for me to learn on, I'm only using two 1TB drives in mirror. No compression, and probably the Crashplan and/or Bakula plug-in to try them out. The only ECC capable Motherboard/CPU combination I have on hand though is a consumer board (MSI 760GM-P23 (FX)) and a low power 1.6 Ghz Dual Core AM3 CPU (I'd add an Intel NIC and 8 GB of ECC RAM). I know this isn't a good fit for anything permanent, but if I can get some experience out of it I'd like to try.

Compatibility issues with AMD not withstanding though, are there any of my use case tasks that I simply won't be able to do with a 1.6 Ghz CPU, regardless of brand? I think my requirements are pretty light, but I've no experience with FreeNAS.

This seems like a great community, thanks to everyone for the excellent advice and guides.

 

[DrKK]

For me, if someone wants to gain "experience" with FreeNAS before they purchase the recommended metal, I *always* recommend that they take a decently powered desktop system, install VMWare Player, and install FreeNAS there.

While we would *NEVER* recommend virtualized FreeNAS for anything serious, it does work quite well as a training thing in VMWare Player. You can simulate failed drives (i.e., by yanking the virtual drive while it's running), and so on.

I think that's a much better use of your time than actually trying to get something working on actual old metal.

 

[Markess]

Brilliant! Even though I work with VMs all day at work, I never think to use one at home. And it makes complete sense for this purpose. I can't believe I didn't think of it, even after seeing the how-to in the documentation.

Cheers!

 

[DrKK]

Brilliant! Even though I work with VMs all day at work, I never think to use one at home. And it makes complete sense for this purpose. I can't believe I didn't think of it, even after seeing the how-to in the documentation.

Cheers!

Excellent.

I, myself, worked with a VMWare Player VM for about 3-4 weeks before I bought my FreeNAS hardware. The only thing you won't be able to do is the "SMART" tests, obviously. You should do the following tasks:

* Create an (at least) 3 drive array
* Simulate a drive failure and replacement
* Configure a jail
* Perform a software update
* Export and re-import pools
* Mess with datasets
* Mess with sharing out datasets and permissions
* Set up scrubbing schedules
* Set up some kind of cron job to do something interesting
* Try "zfs send"ing a dataset to another pool

Tips:

Use small "drives", I recommend a 4GB boot device, and then once you have FreeNAS installed, instantiate a group of three 5GB or 10GB virtual drives for your pool.
Turn off the 2GB swap on system->advanced before you format your drives.

So, hardly anyone does this. People have a tendency to just get all Windowsy or Linuxy, and just install everything and go at it. That's a tactical blunder. In the BSD universe (of which FreeNAS is a part), you need to do the legwork BEFORE you actually put something in production. You'll thank me.