Mr_Flynn

Except for the video card (a 5770 is what, 8 years old at least?) and the lack of an SSD, that seems like a pretty good deal for $100 dollars. Just out of curiosity what are the temps on the CPU? I can't imagine that a Hyper T2 can keep up very well with an FX 8150. Those things were space heaters if I recall correctly.

PfSense wasn't really meant to work that way. In theory it's totally possible, but implementing it will likely be a challenge.

I would just use the flash drive. The only perceivable benefit you might see (hell, ide might end up being slower than USB) would be boot times. When running, most of Freenas is loaded into system memory.

Also if you didn't care about your data. AFAIK 15K drives tend to overheat and vibrate themselves to death relatively often.

I know that's not how it works. That's just the reason he gave. Also, just to edit, a VPN in some cases can (operative word here--DPI can be a counteracting measure your ISP can use) help you get around your ISP throttling your network connection, especially high bandwidth things like Twitch, YouTube, and Netflix. You are right in that it won't get him around data caps and overage charges.

If you're planning to use FreeNAS, don't use hardware RAID (freenas won't be able to properly check and prevent corruption on the disks). Put the drives into a RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 pool through Freenas. These modes are like RAID 5 and 6 respectively, but with a far better anti-corruption feature set.

An SSD would still help if he has a lot of clients hitting the same file or files, even if his network is limited to 1GB.

OP mentioned that he wanted to get around ISP throttling.

Pretty much anything Intel (excluding some of their server stuff) will work out of the box. You should be able to find a really cheap 1gb NIC from Intel on eBay.

Twitch is also notoriously bad at sending notification emails. Sometimes it's on time and other times its not. With a stream like the WAN Show (which has a ~roughly~ set schedule), I just open the stream at 4:30 and keep the tab in the background so I can hear when it starts.

I've been pretty happy with Vultr. They tend to give you a little more memory for the money compared to DigitalOcean. They also have locations in Seattle, San Jose, and LA.

From what I gleaned from this comment and the rest of your comments is that disks are running in hardware RAID 6 provided by the motherboard. Forgetting about the system not booting correctly, which I'll address in a minute, this is a really bad idea. Using hardware RAID prevents Freenas from running proper smart checks on the disks. More importantly it prevents Freenas from running proper parity and data integrity checks which is the headline feature of Freenas. If at all possible (once your sort out the problem with the OS not being found) I would migrate the data on that RAID 6 array to a proper ZFS array configured with Freenas. There are a bunch of tutorials on YouTube that you should be able glean enough information on how to do this. The error message This is a NAS data disk and can not boot system. System halted. means that the disk with Freenas is either missing or corrupt. Basically the message means OS not found. Make sure that the disk or flash drive you installed Freenas to is present in the system and plugged in.

Vultr has the ability to upload your own ISO. Just upload a standard Windows ISO and you should be able to configure it through their web KVM.

Office 2013 and above on Wine and Play on Linux are pretty buggy. If you have an older version, go for it. Anything new is more work than its worth. If you're willing to sacrifice some battery life, I would run Windows in VirtualBox and enable unified windows. That way you can have an office window operating within your DE.

That's either a new level of stupid or he's trolling.