FreeNAS on older server hardware?

Audioaficionado · May 14, 2015

If you wanted to cut the costs down, how would an older single socket ATX or smaller sized server board work using an LGA 1366 Xeon processor? Seems FreeNAS loves lots of ECC memory. Lots of smaller sticks are way less expensive than a few large sticks.

Janus67 · May 14, 2015

FreeNAS definitely loves lots of memory and greatly prefers ECC. Because of that I decided to go with a different NAS software solution (open media vault -- I have 4GB of RAM in the machine, but it isn't running ZFS)

If you are wanting to do this, I would consider using a portion of the server you just built to make it, assign 8GB+1GB/TB of space of RAM and a few CPU threads and it should be good I imagine. If it is running on a hypervisor you will have to deal with some hardware pass-through work though as an FYI (from my understanding)

Audioaficionado · May 14, 2015

Well it's possible to replace my Q6600 with a 771 to 775 modded E5450 Xeon. I wonder if I could get my Asus Commando to support 8GB of ECC then?

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

These specifications will suffice to get a small FreeNAS install running reliably with moderate performance for a few users.

Multicore 64-bit* processor (Intel strongly recommended)
8GB* Boot Drive (USB Flash Drive suffices)
8GB* RAM
At least 1 direct attached disk (Hardware RAID strongly discouraged)
One physical network port

Recommended Minimum Hardware:

These are the specifications for a hardy home media server or small office file share. At this point, your FreeNAS device will have the resources to run third party services and provide respectable performance.

Multicore 64-bit processor
16GB Boot Drive (USB Flash Drive suffices)
16GB (ECC Recommended)
At least 2 direct attached disks (Hardware RAID strongly discouraged)
Drives designed for NAS (such as WD Red drives) are recommended.
At least one physical network port (Intel Recommended)

SuperMicro PDSML-E+ looks interesting and they're cheap.

WhitehawkEQ · May 17, 2015

I looked at FreeNas.org and the software can run on any memory, no need to get ECC ram.

Audioaficionado · May 17, 2015

Data integrity is made easier with ECC memory, but it isn't a requirement. I'm thinking of repurposing my Asus Commando system as a FreeNAS server. It meets the min requirements.

FreeNAS on older server hardware?

Audioaficionado

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Janus67

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WhitehawkEQ

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