Sevilla

I have 2 machines that will be folding. Will I need to assign different names to it and register twice with the 2 different names? New to folding.

You could run ESXI on it and create VMs for all the applications you want, however like @Windows7ge mentioned, don't use FreeNAS with a raid card. FreeNAS works best when it's using it with an HBA. If you're lucky, the raid card can be flashed to work as an HBA, but that's 100% dependant on what card it is.

Remember that FreeNAS tends to have small granular settings you need to go over. Just because you made a share, doesn't mean the share is set to be live. @Olaf6541 narrowed it down best on what to check. Also make sure the account you created has actual permissions to the share.

So I have the Pi-Hole software installed, however it's running on a Hyper-V VM instead (CentOS installation) and it works to the point where my PCs are able to get ads (mostly) taken out while they go through it as a DNS. Here is my issue though, in the video I saw it was blocking YouTube ads left and right. I can get it to block ads on just about any page except YouTube and Hulu. I can see them going through the Pi-Hole and see the accessed site on the logs, but it doesn't block a single ad on YouTube (not even page banners). I've added about 1.2 million blocked domain lists (scoured the internet for various lists), and still, nothing gets blocked in YouTube or Hulu. Did they use a specific master list that works for YouTube?

I have the paid version of Macrium that runs a weekly incremental backup of my gaming desktop onto my NAS. When doing the backup process, just be sure that you’re not selecting for the software to make a backup/image of the hard drive that has your Steam game library. I have all my Steam games on a separate disk and I don’t back those up.

If you don’t particularly care to work on learning anything on networking/VLANs/VPN/etc, then get a standard router you can buy on Amazon or at any box retail store. If you actually want to get your feet wet then I recommend either getting a router you can flash to DD-WRT/Tomato or turn an old PC into a PFSense router (you’ll just need a spare NIC card to add to it.) Pfsense makes more sense for the sake of learning because of all the functionality and plugins you can download and use.

The question I’d have is if you’ve already decided on what OS you’re going to use? Depending on that it’s easier to make some advice.

It depends on the CPU. If it’s dual Xeons, you may want to ensure they are matched pairs.

So to add a bit of info, I'd be using this as a file server which holds documents/media/etc. It also is being used to hold data for a Plex server. Clearly it's never really expected to have super crazy heavy use, but I'd like to ensure performance remains the same as it is now, or is better. Currently on Freenas 11U5 and it runs fine without issues but considering moving this and other servers I have at home to a Windows Server house (cause Im crazy).

Anyone have any experience comparing FREENAS performance (talking standard 20+TB 5 drive array in Raid Z no SSD flash cache) vs the same hardware but running in Server 2012 R2 as a storage pool? I currently have a 1GbE network, but will be upgrading to a 10GbE soon. Can't seem to find a decent comparison, and currently I'm weighing my options.

Performance difference was negligible, i'm a sysadmin and don't do any sort of video production so I doubt I'd ever feel the net benefit from the newer CPU. I've ran the 4930K OC'd but the heat generation and power consumption were always a problem. Gaming was similar, I gained roughly the same about of FPS I expected from upgrading a 980 to a 1080 on both machines.

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but wanted to get a few replies in: For starters, yes, I pulled the trigger and upgraded my entire system. Everyday performance is the same, gaming is a bit better I guess? But by far the most important thing I gained from swapping things was power consumption/heat generation. My old system was chugging power, I think I'd go to almost 400W+ if I was playing Overwatch or anything mildly intense. With my current 8700k system with GTX 1080, I consume maybe 220ish watts total? The reason why this mattered is because I work/play (mostly work) on my desktop daily. And the lower generation of heat and less power consumption was huge for me. It was worth it for me, and the silver lining was I managed to gain back roughly 80% of my expenses to buy the whole new system by selling my old one.

So Windows automatically did install the drivers for me, but I did a clean install and instead used the newest GTX 1080 drivers from the site. It's strange to think official drivers would cause this...

I recently managed to purchase a brand new GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics card to replace my aging GTX 980. Originally I had the 980 running on a system with the following specs: i7 4930k CPU ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition 16GB DDR3 G.Skill Trident RAM 1000W Cooler Master Gold PSU 2 x 250GB Samsung 950 SSD drives in RAID 0 Windows 10 (updated to latest version) Once I received the card, I turned off my system and turned it back on with the card installed with the 8 pin power connector to my PSU and I noticed boot times went from an average 15 to 20 secs to about 1.5 minutes. I thought this was odd but I figured it was new hardware so maybe the graphics card was undergoing some driver re-configuration (after POST it got a black Windows screen right before the login prompt). After a couple of days I realized I didn't really do a clean reinstallation of my drivers, so I did just that and it seems the problem cleared up. My computer from off to boot on Windows was back to about 15 to 20 secs. As planned, I went ahead and purchased new PC parts as I decided to build a new computer. The parts are the following i7 8700k CPU MSI Z370 PC PRO 16GB (2x8) DDR4 G.Skill Ripjaws V Series RAM 1000W Cooler Master Gold PSU (only part re-used) 1 x 250GB M.2 Samsung EVO 960 SSD Windows 10 (updated to latest version) When I was still in the installation process, the boot process always flew. It wasn't until last night after I installed the NVIDIA drivers that I noticed the same behavior as my old system. Boot times on this new machine takes about 1+ mins. I went to the BIOS and enabled quick boot and it behaves about the same. The computer passes the POST screen and it goes to a black screen before it gives me the login prompt. Some notes: - Unlikely that it's the PSU because I reinstalled the 980 on the old system and it behaved as normal, and after the driver update with the 1080 everything seemed to work normally. - My Windows 10 installation is completely clean and free of any other conflicting software. - The card performs in games and benchmarks appropriately for the specs. There is no screen tearing or anything that would indicate there is something wrong with the card. - MB BIOS is latest. I intend to rollback to older drivers when I get to it later today and see if it changes anything, but I am curious if anyone else has experience this.

My board doesn't support the use of PCI-E M.2 adapters...already looked into this.

To reply to a couple of questions: Yes, my current machine is running perfectly fine. 0 issues as of right now. The only thing I wish my board would support is m.2 PCIe drives, but it doesn't. Dual RAID 0 SSDs are hitting 1000/1000 speeds so it's not too bad. Also, I'm more considering the upgrade for "future-proofing" it for the next 3 years (yes, I said that bad word that shouldn't be said in the world of PCs).

I actually originally had a 4770k for gaming when I overhauled my 2600k build, but back then I was a bit more ambitious and after owning a perfectly good 4770k/board combo and went for the 4930k. I benchmarked them both and I got some significant gains with the 4930k but obviously in the CPU-intensive department of all benchmarking software. Gaming-wise it performed near identical if not pulling ahead by a frame or two.

I used to be the guy who after every new generation of CPU/GPU, I'd upgrade everything, motherboard, GPU, CPU, RAM, etc. Eventually I became an adult (though to be fair, I was an adult back then, but finances became clearer) and I stopped upgrading every year. I decided to be a bit more sensible and began upgrading GPUs every other gen, but felt my CPU/mobo/RAM would suffice for a good 3 to 4 years. Well here we are 4 gens later and I am sitting with a PC with the following specs: i7 4930k 6 core 16GB of 2400MHz G.Skill TRIDENT DDR3 RAM ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition GTX 980 I won't list the rest of the components because the cooling/PSU/HDD/SDD setup are trivial in this. I am considering moving to a: 8700k 6 core 16GB of (insert MHz here) DDR4 RAM (insert board here that will cost me around 100-150ish) GTX 1080 Back when I built my machine in 2014 I had a pair of 780 TI Classified cards (not sure why) but I gave them up for a 980 which has server me well for years. So the question is would you upgrade? Why or why not? Before everyone says "Bruh that CPU won't bottleneck your GPU AT ALL" know that I have been an enthusiast for eons, and have overclocked all hardware I've owned and I'm not a novice at this--so try to be kind and not berate with the Captain Obvious hat. I am merely asking for opinions. All benchmarks I've seen of older CPUs (usually 4 core 2nd gens) usually are lower by a few frames here and there, and even so I don't game/nor plan to game at 4K anytime soon. I know upgrading it to just a 1080 would probably be comparable for the most with an 8700k, but given how old the system is, and given how I can probably make some decent cash by selling most of my components (though i'd still probably lose 200 to 400 depending on how kind buyers are) is it worth it to upgrade or would it be wiser to wait another year and upgrade then? Some things to keep in mind: 1. I am not a pro-gamer, but game many hours per week. Mostly WoW/Overwatch/Heroes/GTA5/other games. 2. I am a sysadmin and run my own homelab, so any heavy workloads I typically offload on my server, this PC is 100% for personal/entertainment use. 3. I am not a content creator/streamer (which is why a 6 core is/was overkill, but I'm a PC guy, I don't have a fancy car, but I like having a fancy machine). 4. I run triple 1080p panels, at 60Hz (feel free to laugh at me). I don't intend to upgrade them anytime soon. What I am MOSTLY looking for is some sound opinions because my system has served me well for almost 4 years now. Should I pull the trigger on upgrading now and build for another great 4 years (except the GPU getting upgraded maybe 2 years after), or wait for next gen GPUs and overhaul the entire thing? Most* feedback is welcomed! *except trolls

I think you first need to get a better grasp at what ESXI does. ESXI is a bare-metal hypervisor. Essentially, you're loading ESXI via a USB to boot from that USB--load speeds once the software is loaded and running is inconsequential to how fast your VMs will work. What this means is the USB will load ESXI with all your settings, however, that's all it'll do. The actual VMs and how fast they operate will depend on your hardware and how you allocate it. Another thing to understand is that ESXI is picky with what hardware you can use. Every PCI device or USB device you connect to your machine is subject to work based on compatibility. What this means is just because you have a USB 3.0 USB PCI-E device that worked in Windows 7, doesn't mean it'll work on ESXI (check their huge compatibility lists/Google it). Expect "fakeraid" to fail on ESXI. Those SSDs will effectively become your datastores in ESXI. Essentially, they will hold the virtual machine files in them for every VM you make. To get them to operate as 1 (via RAID) you will need to ensure they are under a hardware RAID 1, not software. You need to also ensure ESXI will recognize whatever hardware raid controller you plan to use so it can even see them as 1 drive. Redundancy is important, and ESXI can make snapshots of your VMs once you have them loaded, so rather than waste 1 entire SSD, make snapshots and back them up to local storage. FreeNAS is meant purely to run as a storage solution, however, it permits you to run certain applications (Plex/Crashplan/etc), but it does not operate like a Windows environment where you can install and run what you want. FreeNAS is also NOT a hypervisor, it's purely meant for file storage. Get better versed on ESXI and FreeNAS before you proceed. Also, note that components like the graphics card you have on it will effectively be lost to ESXI once you run it--meaning you cannot assign/allocate it to any VM, meaning once you turn on the monitor, all you'll see is the basic vSphere page telling you to go to whatever IP you assigned as the managed IP. It took me a few months but I got my hands on a server and I run ESXI 6.0 on it. There I run a FreeNAS VM that has 16TBs of HDD space in RAID Z working as my file server, I have an application Server 2012 R2 VM running some software I use for other machines on my network as well as backup utilities, I have a Linux SSH file server online host, I have a Plex VM running on another Linux install...etc, etc. There are tons of things you can do on ESXI--but you need to do your research. It's not easy, it's kinda frustrating when things don't work, but when you get a better grasp at how it works, the uses are pretty limitless.

Are you looking for a full fledged server or a basic network attached storage solution?

FreeNAS doesn't require 1GB per 1TB, but it does recommend it. The more RAM you feed it, the happier it'll be. For Plex, it depends whether it's encoding locally or remotely. I'm sure given it's a quad core CPU it'll do fine, but don't expect more than maybe 2 1080p streams at once at best quality.

Try swappa.com -- cheaper to sell there and can use your eBay rating if it's good.

Blues and reds will have the same functionality of any HDD, however, the primary difference is that reds are specced to withstand 24/7 operation whereas blues are meant for standard HDD desktop operation. Warranties are also a bit different, with reds you get a better warranty than with blues.

So one thing you can test is connect directly to your modem to your PC. This completely takes the router out of the equation. If you can connect through port 20/21, then your router still is blocking it. If you cannot then you should call your ISP and find out if they block out that port.

Get a server that isn't a slim rack-mount unit. Remember servers come in desktop PC tower sizes too and benefit from larger quieter fans.