Captain3xtreme

It's going to be used for college I believe. 13 inch is probably a good size.

I've been out of the loop for a while now with PC hardware etc. and I was asked to recommend a $700 usd laptop. It won't be used for gaming. I figured I would just go with a good brand then find something in the price range but I don't really know which brand is the best. Any suggestions?

All I know is that one of the most prevalent members of the freenas forums will tell you to never use non-ECC ram under any circumstances. Maybe if you don't use the scrub feature it makes no difference but I haven't heard that before.

I used to use freenas until I read on their forums that they strongly discourage not using ECC RAM(and you need a ton of it) because with ZFS all of your data can be corrupted by failing RAM. I switched to using openmediavault plus omv-extras.org and have been very happy.

If possible I would change providers considering you are getting nowhere near the speeds you are paying for. Cellular internet is likely going to have horrendous caps and be less reliable than most land line connections.

I'm pretty sure you want to connect pfsense directly to the modem then connect the lan interface to a lan port on your router.

Sorry to resurrect this but another company you should never buy anything from is SaveCentral on Amazon. The card they sent me as an exchange for the one with the broken fan they sent me is also defective and they are basically refusing to refund me since it's been over 30 days. They are telling me to go deal with PNY again so hopefully they can get it right the second time otherwise I literally just threw away more than $300 on nothing and there's nothing I can do about it.

You can install MiniDLNA on OMV easily using the plugin. The main benefit of using Plex is the fact that you can easily watch your content even outside of your local network.

I think Plex is pretty unique in what it does transcoding video, Subsonic does something similar but I haven't tested it.

Look up OpenMediaVault and omv-extras. You can get Plex set up pretty much automatically and there is a plugin for Owncloud as well that I haven't really used. Worst case you can still set up Owncloud manually just as easily as you can on any Debian system.

You should install Freenas onto virtualbox and create 3 virtual disks to see what options UFS supports. I had a UFS mirror for a while that worked fine. Also according to one of the devs on the Freenas forums UFS is being completely removed in the future. Freenas definitely looses its allure for me when you have to use hardware that supports ECC ram and massive amounts of it for your custom NAS build. My experience is that after I heard about UFS support being removed I went looking for other NAS software and found OpenMediaVault which is Debian based and amazing in my opinion. It doesn't have the Jails feature of Freenas but you can accomplish all the same things you can do on Freenas. I have an OpenMediaVault NAS running right now with Plex and Transmission installed, I can also run a Minecraft server on it and Owncloud. Look up omv-extras if you do decide to use it.

Something else I forgot to include was that I specifically mentioned in the RMA form that the fan near the inputs was broken but that still wasn't enough to catch their attention apparently.

It's as simple as this: I bought a 770 4gb PNY card from amazon, it had a defective fan so I did an RMA to PNY and they returned to me unfixed after about 20 days claiming it had passed their tests. Luckily the amazon seller is doing the right thing and is going to exchange the card for me. I sent an email to PNY about a week ago urging them to make it right but I have not received a response yet so I'm assuming they're ignoring me. Just be warned that if you buy a PNY card don't expect their warranty to cover anything except a complete failure of the GPU apparently.

I don't think there is any good reason why a drive would be randomly disconnecting itself unless the cable is loose, the drive is failing or the motherboard is failing.

I don't know but if it's failing anyways might as well try formatting.