I’ve made lots of references to FreeNAS in the earlier ‘technology’ related posts, so thought it might be interesting to pull it all together here and go into a little more detail about my FreeNAS use.
I first started using FreeNAS at the end of 2013. I’d been running a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ for a number of years, but after maxing the storage capacity at 4x2TB HDDs I’d finally run out of space so needed a replacement. I’d initially looked at similar consumer NAS devices (Synology, Qnap, Netgear) that worked with larger capacity drives and/or offered more bays, but then a good friend offered to lend me an HP Microserver he’d picked up cheap and no longer required. He’d been using one to run NAS4Free, although recommended looking at FreeNAS if I was starting from scratch.
I bought 4x3TB HDDs and configured the small box to run FreeNAS relatively painlessly as there’s a great forum with lots of knowledgeable and friendly people willing to offer their help and advice. After getting it up and running as a basic NAS device, I then started to notice other things I could do with FreeNAS that I’d typically used my iMac to run.
This started by delving into the world of FreeNAS plugins, an automated system for creating FreeNAS jails containing a single service (e.g. Plex), although this proved problematic when it came to updating them. Then, moving onto manually creating the jails and installing and configuring the services within, which was probably an even more painful experience with a very steep learning curve (at least for someone with little command line experience, and none using FreeBSD [the OS used in FreeNAS jails]
After creating and destroying more jails than I’d like to remember, I finally became reasonable self-sufficient, at least in terms of maintaining the ones I’d created from helpful guides on the FreeNAS forum, and more recently creating my own jails using just the knowledge and experience gained over the last 3+ years.
The HP Microserver (an N40L) was soon nearing capacity and, unlike the ReadyNAS where you increase the capacity by replacing individual disks, once you’ve created a FreeNAS pool you can’t increase the capacity without destroying and recreating the pool.
This was a major issue, as the ReadyNAS I was using as a backup device wasn’t big enough to hold all the data on the N40L, so the easiest solution was to build another HP Microserver (with an ever so slightly more powerful N54L) this time using 4x4TB HDDs. The N40L would become the backup, and the ReadyNAS was sold on eBay after several years of rock solid service.
This worked well for a while, but in hindsight, I should have been looking for something more powerful than the N54L when I bought it, as whilst it was great as a File Server, some of the Media stuff I was asking it to do was well above its pay grade!
After a reasonably good year workwise, along with a few months off between contracts I eventually built my own FreeNAS server which is now running with the following components:
- Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard
- Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 3.4 GHz Processor
- Crucial 4x 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM
- SeaSonic 660XP2 PSU
- Fractal Define R5 Case
- APC BE700G UPS
- 120GB Toshiba Q300 SSD (boot device)
- 9x4TB Seagate NAS HDDs
Whilst this is more than I probably needed, the idea was to build big in the hope it would last for a good 3-4 years before anything would need upgrading. That didn’t quite work out as when it was built it only had a 450W PSU, booted from 2xUSB drives and had 7x4TB HDDs!
After learning more about jails and using them to run Virtual Machines (VMs) I soon realised I needed more storage, and thought it sensible to rebuild the pool whilst I still had a backup device capable of storing all the data. This was one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve done with a computer, but it all worked out well with not even the smallest of problems. The 2 USB drives were replaced with an SSD I’d bought for something else but never used, and the PSU (with the additional drives) was probably underpowered, so was the last thing to be upgraded.
It should last me for at least another 2 years as-is, by which point I’ll probably need to build another with newer technology but along very similar lines.
And I haven’t really got into what I actually use FreeNAS for! Here’s another bullet list, but I’d do another post at some point with a little more explanation:
- Plex Media Server (a couple of jails)
- PlexPy
- PlexEmail
- emby
- ownCloud
- Nextcloud
- openVPN
- Unbound (DNS)
- Calibre
- Webserver (FEMP)
- Nginx Proxy
- VirtualBox (4 jails running various Windows, Linux and FreeBSD OSs)
To be continued…
Recent Comments