Home NAS server - what to use

[slag]

I was going to create a cheap NAS server at home using a few terrabyte disks I have and existing hardware, but then found out that FREENAS requires a MINIMUM of 8 GB of Ram. Whoa.. I only have 4 in my extra motherboard, so that won't work and its DDR2 so yeah, 8 GB of RAM would be super expensive.

Are there any other FREE nas solutions out there that will work with 4 GB of ram? Unraid costs money and I want to do this free to test out some things.

Looks like perhaps NAS4Free is my best option. http://www.openmediavault.org/ looks pretty nice also but not as supported perhaps.

 

[slag]

downloaded nas4free and will install it tonight or this weekend.

 

[Magic Carpet]

http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.9/RELEASE/x86/

The x86 version was fine w/ 4 gigs of ram. No longer maintained though. Might give it a shot if it's for home usage.

 

[slag]

http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.9/RELEASE/x86/

The x86 version was fine w/ 4 gigs of ram. No longer maintained though. Might give it a shot if it's for home usage.

i wonder if there is any benefit using a 32 bit version vs 64 bit version for 1-3 people tops who might be streaming something. 99.9% of the time the server is just serving up movies to kodi over gig e, or possibly plex over wireless.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Should be fine. Just make sure to use UFS instead of ZFS.

 

[smitbret]

Should be fine. Just make sure to use UFS instead of ZFS.

Exactly what I was thinking. ZFS is memory hungry and 4GB would be a nightmare.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Just use NAS4Free.

Or, hell, any old Linux distro. (If you can config it right, you can get all the same features.)

 

[slag]

I'll try freenas tonight and if it doesn't work for me, I'll mess around with nas4free. I'm hoping my old board chipset and network, etc is supported. Reading up on all of it now.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Exactly what I was thinking. ZFS is memory hungry and 4GB would be a nightmare.

Not just that. ECC memory is pretty much a must for ZFS. I presume, the OP isn't running server parts.

 

[slag]

Nope, just a small older phenom II 720 desktop combo.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Good combo for your first NAS and let us know how it pans out.

 

[cbn]

Rockstor lists 2GB minimum RAM:

http://rockstor.com/docs/quickstart.html

(I haven't used this one yet, but looks very interesting)

 

[slag]

I got it all set up and its working well. I am using it for movies, music, photos, and RCB emulator and addons. It's decently fast with my hardware and aside from installation issues (you can't use the .iso file to create a bootable USB iso, you have to use the .usb file for 9.2.1.9 to make it work which is dumb, but I digress. After figuring that all out, its working. Oh, and I was logged into the PIA VPN while I tried to create an account for their forum and my account creation was eventually denied from their admin for that reason. I searched and could find nothing in their rules about going through a VPN to access said forum so they can suck it.

I couldn't use the UFS creation tool, it kept crashing back to the gui, but the ZFS tool worked fine. So, I'm using the 32 bit install with ZFS and 4 GB of ram with 4 SATA disks and its humming right along.

 

[|JosephB17331|]

EasyNAS
OpenFiler
Rockstor
OMV
NexentaStor community edition

 

[Mushkins]

Do you even need a real "NAS" or just a network share? Unless you need true NAS features because you're using it as a backup or storage for mission critical data, you don't really need a NAS-oriented OS. Any old OS can get you set up with a network share without meeting crazy hardware requirements.

 

[slag]

Do you even need a real "NAS" or just a network share? Unless you need true NAS features because you're using it as a backup or storage for mission critical data, you don't really need a NAS-oriented OS. Any old OS can get you set up with a network share without meeting crazy hardware requirements.

I'm a home user. No home user "needs" NAS. A plain jane networked NFS or NTFS share would work fine, but I wanted to play around with what was out there and use a product that was designed for this purpose. I'm going to purchase 2 or 3 4 TB drives here in the near future and rebuild my pool and keep playing around but I wanted a central storage location to house media to use at multiple points around the house.

I'm also going to use this as a backup location for my desktop and my wife's laptop but those are the only machines that I will be incrementally backing up on schedule (Weekly).

 

[Beer4Me]

nevermind. Didn't read the post but only thread title. Sorry.

 

[V00DOO]

I am in the similar situation. I have an old PC with only 4gb of memory and like to play around with NAS. I am going to try the X86 version of Freenas and see how it runs. Have you setup Plex? I am curious how Plex would run with your setup.