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A place for discussion of general audio, music and related topics.
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FreeNAS

January 13th, 2020, 7:22 pm

Just curious if anyone in the group uses FreeNAS and considers themselves proficient with it? FreeNAS has a very robust support Forum, but I’m looking for someone local who may be able to help out in person in a pinch.
V/R
James

Re: FreeNAS

January 13th, 2020, 7:36 pm

I've got two freenas servers here....

Roscoe

Re: FreeNAS

January 16th, 2020, 6:07 am

What kind of PC can you use with it?

Re: FreeNAS

January 16th, 2020, 9:14 am

Is there an advantage to these over say a Synology NAS for music? They appear to be roughly in the same price range.

Re: FreeNAS

January 17th, 2020, 12:52 pm

I use Openmediavault, which is Linux-based and will run on a Raspberry Pi. You can connect some USB storage drives to it and you have an instant network server. I use a 12-volt mini-ITX board with three 8TB drives in an inexpensive case, pictured below. I think FreeNas requires an x86 (Windows-type) PC or board.

1858FF4C-3393-4FA0-9FF7-440FB898944C.jpeg

Re: FreeNAS

January 18th, 2020, 10:29 pm

Is there a more compact version of that?

A portable one?

Re: FreeNAS

January 19th, 2020, 12:45 am

Depends how much space you need. A 2TB MyCloud works just fine, but it's not as configurable. I don't actually have mine in NAS configuration, too risky. Openmediavault is just a way to link the three drives into one server.

I mean, you can connect a 1TB USB drive to your router and access it through your network.

Re: FreeNAS

January 19th, 2020, 2:11 am

Mine does not have an USB port.

Re: FreeNAS

January 20th, 2020, 5:57 pm

If you want to build something smaller then it might just be a matter of using a smaller chassis. I just built a computer using a thin ITX board with a Celeron processor (gen 4) to use as a music streamer. It has room in the chassis for four 3.5 drives. I’m using a TB SSD drive for the OS and local storage and 6 TB USB drive for my music library. Power supply is an old Dell laptop power supply. Chassis is about 11” square and no more than 4” high. I’m running it fanless. Turns out it has plenty of power to run Roon Core so it’s turned into my Roon Core server (headless) and my music storage. Building it to be a NAS server would be pretty simple but probably overkill. Raspberry Pi in a small box might be about right. There’s not much computational load just doing read/write.

Re: Free

January 20th, 2020, 8:10 pm

Jim G wrote:Is there an advantage to these over say a Synology NAS for music? They appear to be roughly in the same price range.


There are two parts to a NAS:
RAID system and OS which supports network presentation of file system. FreeNAS is an customized OS which supports former. RAID, the core of NAS is best done by a “mature” RAID controller. Companies like Synology and Qnap develop their own hardware and OS, so they operate trouble free mostly. To build a NAS server at home with FreeNAS , you need to take care of hardware. A good RAID controller from companies like LSI, Dell, HP costs about $300-$600. Typically the PCs include $15 RAID controllers.

Unless you are technically saavy like Roscoe,I would recommend against building a FreeNAS system. You don’t want to loose all your song collection because the the Silliness of the cheap hardware that comes with consumer PCs. A server class computer costs about 10 times more than a similarly configured PC.
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