Will a BananaPi run freenas?

[TheLegalBeagle]

The one I have has I think an octa core cpu (didn't check but it has at least 4 cores, 64 bit), 2GB ram and one sata port. I know the 2GB is below the required 8GB, but I got it to run on a old server with 2GB of DDR2 (other than the fact it had a pcie nas controller). This currently has a 16GB boot sd card.

 

[Jailer]

This is an incredibly bad idea for many reasons.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

To expand and give a bit of context on what @Jailer said; FreeNAS requires 8GB of ram to run well. You could run older versions but consider that newer versions have performance improvements, security improvements etc. With only a single SATA port how would you add more drives? If you can't add a lot of drives the benefit of FreeNAS is completely eliminated and all you're left with is the time required to learn about and set up FreeNAS with no obvious benefit to you for your time vs another solution.

Often I think questions like this are a bit vague in terms of what it means to run FreeNAS. There is a ton of hardware out there which will happily run the OS but will it run it well and will you be able to get a functionally usable system in the end is something you have to consider. The problem comes when you consider the performance that you'll get vs the cost in money and time to run it. FreeNAS isn't a set it and forget it style appliance and relies on the user knowing how to set it up and build it appropriately to have reliable data preservation and performant access to that data. If using inappropriate hardware such as this you just gotta ask yourself why you'd install FreeNAS on that hardware. If you only hope to do it to play around with it then sure, go nuts. If you plan to use it to actually store and preserve your data you'll find that it won't perform or be reliable and you may be happier with a different solution.

 

[Jurgen Segaert]

BananaPi is ARM and FreeNAS is x86_64/AMD64

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

BananaPi is ARM and FreeNAS is x86_64/AMD64

Even better reason not to try it! :)

 

[rvassar]

No. Not enough memory... Wrong CPU architecture.

That said... FreeBSD is rumored to run on ARM RaspberryPi / BananaPi boards... And perhaps might support ZFS. You'd probably be starved for memory. I tried to get FreeBSD running on a Pi board once... Quite frustrating. You have to merge the boot loader with the build distribution yourself. Since I didn't have a serial console, I didn't get a lot to debug.

 

[Constantin]

Given the right resources ($$$) I am sure that FreeNAS can be made to run and be maintained on ARM. But there is a lot more to hardware than getting a software package to compile.

For example, the hardware section here details what kind of hardware a enthusiast ought to get - ECC RAM, a ECC-capable motherboard and CPU, at least 6 SATA ports, etc. Then there are the nice to haves like an IPMI interface, console video, etc.

By the time you get all this into a hardware platform, your footprint and cost has grown substantially. Not sure one could compete with the used intel market on price... perhaps if very low power consumption is the design objective?

As Apple and other OEMs have shown, RISC platforms can make effective barebones NAS’ but I wouldn’t compare them to a proper FreeNAS rig. It’s apples and oranges.