Help with NAS

[Sri]

Hi,

I have never used NAS and planning to build one with FreeNAS.
I see that it requires a huge learning curve and Im ready to deal with it. I have a question regarding hardware setup. I want to keep costs as low as possible and planning to use one of old 'i3; laptop which needs memory upgrade and connect hard drive tower eg Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2 initially with a pair of WD green drive.

Can anyone give their opinion on this setup whether it works or I need to rethink the whole setup.

 

[L&LD]

If this is for personal use and storing media files (which you can replace), keep at it.

If this is for work or the data is more important, I recommend you save up for a QNAP NAS instead.

 

[stevech]

If this is for work or the data is more important, I recommend you save up for a QNAP NAS instead.

There is a British saying I always loved, “penny wise, pound foolish.” I took it to mean, “making decisions with small amounts of money (pennies) that end up making bad sense for affecting larger amounts of money (pounds, as in Great British Pounds).

 

[Sri]

Thanks for all your opinions. This is only for personal use and not planning to put much data on NAS. Its only for sharing home videos and pics initially.
Once I'm comfortable with FreeNAS then I was planning to invest good amount on hardware to build a NAS system ground-up.

 

[sfx2000]

If this is for work or the data is more important, I recommend you save up for a QNAP NAS instead.

Tend to agree here - Synology and QNAP make excellent 2-bay NAS's for pretty much any budget...

 

[stevech]

Tend to agree here - Synology and QNAP make excellent 2-bay NAS's for pretty much any budget...

Agree. I have many miles on my circa 2012 DS212. Zero problems. Easy to admin.
Both QNAP and Synology release new products each year. Very competitive. Try their on-line demos.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Thanks for all your opinions. This is only for personal use and not planning to put much data on NAS. Its only for sharing home videos and pics initially.
Once I'm comfortable with FreeNAS then I was planning to invest good amount on hardware to build a NAS system ground-up.

Unless you want to build up your skills as a NAS builder, I'd suggest going with one of the commercial units (normally I recommend Synology units for most people). You take the system out of the box, install the drives, power it up and you're good to go. You've got both commercial vendor support as well as (generally) a good-sized user community which can also provide help and advice.

If you "roll your own" you can have different levels of involvement - anything from buying a complete integrated piece of hardware and installing something like FreeNAS on it, all the way to specifying each and every hardware component and then doing an OS install from scratch (something like FreeBSD) and then installing only the applications you want. You can end up spending a lot of money that way, but you will get something perfectly tailored to your needs. Regardless of what level of DIY you decide on, don't fall into the trap of thinking you can put the thing together in a weekend or two and be ready to start filling it with important data. There will be performance tuning, testing what happens on various hardware failures, etc.

And once you have your home-built system going, you have one-of-a-kind box that only you can support (at least without a steep learning curve by someone else).

It only made sense for me to build my original RAIDzilla (2005) and my RAIDzilla II (2010) systems because I also build them for my day job. Currently the RAIDzilla IIb holds 128TB in 3RU (click on each pic for larger version):

 

[KenZ71]

I'll be the contrarian FreeNas and NAS4Free are pretty stable and reliable. I would even say possibly more so than the pre-built variety simply because if / when hardware fails it is a simple drop in to replace parts.

Used FreeNas for almost a year then converted to NAS4Free shortly after they forked very happy with the performance.

About a year ago I upgraded my NAS hardware. The conversion was cave man simple - 1) pull the usb for the OS 2) move data drives then insert to the new box & start it up.

As for support there is an active & friendly community at forums. NAS4Free.Org