Turning old "high end" pc into a Freenas.

[Norwegiantweaker]

Hello!.

i was wondering what kind of hardware issues i might run into when setting up Freenas on my old gaming pc. 

 

it's got a RIVE x79 with a 3960x. Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz, samsung 870 ssd and a handful of WD Black 2TB's 

 

tried to look around for some hardware "limitations" but didn't really find anything specific on different forums. 

 

Thanks! 

 

[Radium_Angel]

13 minutes ago, Norwegiantweaker said:

Hello!.

i was wondering what kind of hardware issues i might run into when setting up Freenas on my old gaming pc. 

 

it's got a RIVE x79 with a 3960x. Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz, samsung 870 ssd and a handful of WD Black 2TB's 

 

tried to look around for some hardware "limitations" but didn't really find anything specific on different forums. 

 

Thanks! 

 

You mean aside from being overkill? NAS boxes don't need much power

[ProjectBox153]

That's a very beefy system for a simple NAS, but it should work fine. I don't see why it wouldn't. Even my old Core 2 Duo based NAS saturates the gigabit link it has when reading from it, and it almost saturates it when writing as well. 

[Norwegiantweaker]

8 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

You mean aside from being overkill? NAS boxes don't need much power

 

6 minutes ago, ProjectBox153 said:

That's a very beefy system for a simple NAS, but it should work fine. I don't see why it wouldn't. Even my old Core 2 Duo based NAS saturates the gigabit link it has when reading from it, and it almost saturates it when writing as well. 

oh i know it's absolutely overpowered for its use.

i just don't have anything better to do with the machine.

i was just concerned with running freenas on.

it it's my understanding that linux doesn't like to be ran on just anything or is that more from a consumer standpoint perhaps ?

[ProjectBox153]

22 minutes ago, Norwegiantweaker said:

 

oh i know it's absolutely overpowered for its use.

i just don't have anything better to do with the machine.

i was just concerned with running freenas on.

it it's my understanding that linux doesn't like to be ran on just anything or is that more from a consumer standpoint perhaps ?

FreeNAS should work perfectly fine. It runs on a very wide variety of computers. I run it on a 12 year old office computer with absolutely no issues apart from a failing power supply. 

[bearFNF]

Only thing I would suggest is running FreeNAS on a thumb drive so you don't unnecessarily waste the capacity of your hard drives.

[Norwegiantweaker]

15 hours ago, bearFNF said:

Only thing I would suggest is running FreeNAS on a thumb drive so you don't unnecessarily waste the capacity of your hard drives.

what do you mean ?. can i not have it on a SSD and still use some of the ssd space ? 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, Norwegiantweaker said:

what do you mean ?. can i not have it on a SSD and still use some of the ssd space ? 

 

A boot drive can be used for boot only, so if you install it onto a ssd, that extra space can't be used for something else.

[dbx10]

On 1/22/2021 at 2:37 PM, Norwegiantweaker said:

Hello!.

i was wondering what kind of hardware issues i might run into when setting up Freenas on my old gaming pc. 

 

it's got a RIVE x79 with a 3960x. Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz, samsung 870 ssd and a handful of WD Black 2TB's 

 

tried to look around for some hardware "limitations" but didn't really find anything specific on different forums. 

 

Thanks! 

 

Just do a mem test, especially if you have overclocked your memory at some point. Bad non-ECC memory can introduce bit rot errors to your pool, and corrupt data.

 

As for other hardware issues, I don't see what else would cause issues. ZFS is pretty good at kicking out bad drives so you'll find out soon enough if any issues arise.

 

[Norwegiantweaker]

On 1/24/2021 at 6:06 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

A boot drive can be used for boot only, so if you install it onto a ssd, that extra space can't be used for something else.

interesting. boot drive will be purchased in that case. thanks for the heads up  

[Switchboy]

It should run fine. Although I think freeNAS and ZFS especially is overkill for the homelab enviroment. You pay quite a hefty ZSF-Tax when doing any kind of upgrade later down the road. For referernce: https://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-your-home-nas.html

 

You might want to look into more flexible solutions like linux with snapraid/mergerFS or unraid although the latter is not free. If you still like a one stop shop that is free look into openmediavault. It runs debian linux under the hood so you should not run into any hardware/driver issues. Which is a slight risk with freeNAS since it is freeBSD under the hood.

 

Since the machine is overkill and is going to sit idle for 99% of the time, be sure to remove any overclock you had. You could even consider undervolting and or downclocking your hardware to save a bit on power consumption.