Will this Oldtimer work?

[ManWithOldHardware]

Guys, I have an ancient Windows XP tower (built in 2005) standing here, which has one main advantage: it fits eight SATA hard disks, and it just so happens that I have eight here, and they are all not too old, but they each have 1 TB.

The question before tinkering is: is it worth it, and can I do it?I'm not a tinkerer or a software expert, I'm a user. At some point I (I think) managed to install a gigabit network card and one for USB3 in this PC.

"The device" has a DFI Lanparty nF4 motherboard, ample 4 GB RAM. There is also a raid controller on board, but it was always a mess. The highly advanced AMD X2 processor is probably overshadowed by my smartphone. A gigabit card is on board. And the box works.

I'm from the Mac corner, have a little user experience with Windows XP and 7 and a little bit of Ubuntu.

What do you think, is this a game I can win? If so, where is the one for dummys among the many instructions?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Not enough RAM. Minimum required for FreeNAS is 8 GB, and things run noticeably better with 16 GB. For that board, 4 GB is the maximum supported.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Looking through the documentation for historic versions of FreeNAS, the earliest version 8.0.1 still needed 6 GB RAM minimum.

 

[pschatz100]

As @Samuel Tai pointed out, memory will be your problem. Even if you get it running, it won't be stable and reliable. Also, whether or not your gigabit and USB3 add-on cards are supported will depend upon their specific hardware - no way to comment on this without more information.

At the end of the day, this hardware is not a good choice for FreeNAS.

 

[ManWithOldHardware]

Ok, thank you. What a pity.

 

[NickF]

Dont waste your time. Instead you could use that box to just run SAMBA on Linux. You will lose out of ZFS, but it would work fine (albeit while drinking alot of power).
You can probably follow along with guides on how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a file server. Debian or Ubuntu on x86 would work similarly enough to Raspbian to follow along with for what you are trying to do.

 

[pschatz100]

To the OP: If you are up for a project, you could pick up a used motherboard and CPU, and then re-purpose the rest. That is how I got started. I wanted to learn about servers, so I picked up a used supermicro board and went from there. An old system won't be as energy efficient as newer hardware, but it is not that bad for the kind of machine you are likely to build.

For FreeNAS, the issue is coming up with a system that will support more memory. You need at least 8GB ram - 16GB would be better.

If you really want to use that hardware as is with 4GB memory, and you are satisfied creating a system that will act as a traditional NAS (fileserver with no plugins, virtual machines, etc.), there are some Linux-based systems out there that can do the job. Do some internet searching.

 

[kiriak]

I recently used my ancient PC with similar specs (core 2 Duo 8400 with 4 Gb RAM) and 2 spare 500 gb HDDs
to make a FreeNAS 11.3 NAS

besides the warning in the installation it run fine
I copied some data and take a taste of pools, datasets, smb and acl setup, snapshots, snapshot replication etc.

of course it is not recommended for storing one's precious data,
but for me was a great way to have an idea about what FreeNAS is
and I liked it a lot,

now I'm looking for the smaller box that can FreeNAS in line with the recommendations to replace my Syno 218+
(HP microserver gen 10+ is the smallest box I could find)

in the meantime experiments are keeping on (on a i3 NUC with 8 gb RAM - again not a recommended setup)

 

[pschatz100]

The issue about memory with FreeNAS is not so much that it doesn't run when there is too little memory, but that it is not reliable. Sure, you can build a system to play with - but do not expect it to be reliable for real work.

The memory requirement is mostly a ZFS file system thing. If you do some searching on the internet, you will find that all systems using ZFS require a minimum of 8GB memory.

There is a reason for the warning during installation.