{"id":3451,"date":"2016-01-03T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-01-03T01:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/?p=3451"},"modified":"2016-01-03T10:41:54","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T00:41:54","slug":"freenas-a-few-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.penguinpunk.net\/blog\/freenas-a-few-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"FreeNAS – A few notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mat<\/a> and I have been talking about FreeNAS<\/a> a lot recently. My QNAP TS-639 Pro is approaching 7 years old and I’m reluctant to invest further money in drives for it. So we’ve been doing a bit of research on what might be good hardware and so forth. I thought I’d put together a few links that I found useful and share some commentary.<\/p>\n

Firstly, FreeNAS has been around for a while now, and there is a plethora of useful documentation available via the official documentation<\/a>, forums and blog posts. While digging through the comments on a post I noticed someone saying that the FreeNAS crowd like to patronise people a lot. It might be a little unfair, although they do sometimes come across as a bit dickish, so be prepared. It’s like anything on the internet really.<\/p>\n

Secondly, most of the angst comes about through the choices people make for their DIY hardware builds. There’s a lot of talk about ECC RAM<\/a> and why it’s critical to a decent build<\/a>. I have a strong dislike of the word “noobs” and variants, but there are some good points made in this thread. Brian Moses<\/a> has an interesting counter here<\/a>, which I found insightful as well. So, your mileage might vary. For what it’s worth, I’m not using ECC RAM in my current build, but\u00a0I am by no means a shining light when it comes to best practice for IT in the home. If I was going to store data on it that I couldn’t afford to reload from another source (I’m using it to stream mkv files around the house) I would look at ECC.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, one of the “folk of the forum”, as I’ll now call them, has a handy primer on FreeNAS that you can view in a few different ways here<\/a>. It hasn’t been updated in a little while, but it covers off a lot of the salient points when looking at doing your own build<\/a> and getting started with FreeNAS. If you want a few alternative approaches to what may or may not work for you, have a look at Brian’s post here<\/a>, as well as this one<\/a> and this one<\/a>. Also, if you’re still on the fence about FreeNAS, take a look at Brian’s DIY NAS Software Roundup<\/a> – it’s well written and covers a number of the important points. The key takeaways when looking at doing your own build are as follows:<\/p>\n