This is my first time here I 've been watching the show for a while now, but didn 't need any ...

[G+_Steve Kendel]

This is my first time here. I've been watching the show for a while now, but didn't need any help/advice till now.

 

I have absolutely had it with buying Seagate external drives and having them go south. Especially when they have ridiculous 1-year warranties like this one that died a couple of days ago. It was only just a little shy of being 2 years old. (Luckily I was able to get my data off.)

 

With that being said, I am wanting to venture into the world of FreeNAS. Instead of buying another external drive that has a little bit of a premium because of the case and controller in it, I figured that it would be better to put in some big drives in an old computer I have to maybe get some redundancy of some sort going along with the storage of the NAS. That should give me space and piece of mind in case this sort of thing happens again.

 

I have an older HP machine (m8150n to be precise) that I can use for the NAS. If I remember right, it has a Q6600 quad-core Intel running at something like 2.4GHz. It has 3GB of RAM in it. Not really looking to invest any more money into it, just in drives for the NAS. Just wanting to get some feel here from folks to see if you guys think that should be enough to do the job.

 

I am wanting to install the Plex Media Server plugin on it as well so I can take the load off my main Windows machine (and so I can shut it down every now and then, too). From what I understand, you have to use the ZFS to install the Plex server. Is that correct? And, if it is, will this rig handle that load? Especially with only 3GB of RAM.

 

I will withhold my other questions about this until I get some feedback on this first post. Thanks!!!

[G+_Arcturus Lancaster]

Q66 is enough. Running on one myself. When I did the reading the recommended was 1gb/ tb . no idea the demand plex puts on the server. Just run cifs on mine. Mirrored drives is the easiest redundant and also possible drop a drive into another system if the server blows.

[G+_Steve Kendel]

Figured out a little more about this Seagate drive that just died on me. Danged thing seized up on me tonight. I unplugged it to try on a different machine and I heard this dry grinding like noise come out of it. I plugged it into the new machine and it wouldn't do anything but like a beep like noise. No spinning, no nothing. I twisted it like you would rotate a wheel and it freed up a little and started trying, but died a little after that. Now when you plug it in, it tries to spin up, but shuts down after a couple of seconds. No wonder it had a year warranty with lubrication like that!

[G+_Jason Marsh]

Had the same happen on my mom's HDD, a Hitachi 7K750. Heads stuck to platters. I got it loose once and started a SpinRite run, but it was showing tens of thousands of hours until complete after about an hour into it so I gave up on any recovery effort and installed to a new drive. Many times there are signs that trouble is coming, other times no warning at all. Meh, whatta ya do about it?

 

On to your server question, I doubt PMS "requires" you use ZFS on a FreeNAS system, but I never ran PMS on FreeNAS. You can run just about any OS as a centralized storage server, even the ones from M$. You can install free duplication apps on the *nixes but I don't have any experience with any for Windows systems. If you're unfamiliar with Linux/Unix/Mac OS, and would prefer sticking with Windows for familiarity or some perceived compatibility issue, there are commercial apps that will duplicate your data across multiple drives. Or you can use RAID if you like. Whatever you're comfortable with.

[G+_Ron Nichols]

Hi Steve. Aside from Plex and redundancy, what else do you want your NAS to do?

 

Regarding ZFS: It exists mainly to ensure data integrity with the RAID. It acts like a hardware RAID controller, and therein lies the problem. Using ZFS with non-ecc RAM like you have, is a big no-no and can lead to the destruction of your entire RAID. However, my FreeNAS was non-ECC and I'm still alive to tell the tale, but why go through the trouble of building a FreeNas/RAID, storing all your media on it, and then putting it at risk with non-ECC RAM? So to do it right, you need to build a new machine and should not use your HP.

 

The Plex plugin installation will occur inside of a jail that is setup via the FreeNAS UI. Here is the tutorial I used and found very helpful. I don't know if anything has changed since this tutorial: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/tutorial-how-to-install-plex-in-a-jail.19412/

 

That being said, your old machine would make a pitiful NAS in my opinion (mainly the RAM). However, it would be an excellent stand-alone Plex server (since they're almost entirely CPU dependent), and Windows can handle backing up your files.

 

I have a machine similar to yours. I tried to turn it into a FreeNAS machine a while back. It was not a pleasant experience, especially getting the Plex plugin right and performance was sub par. Since I just want a box to store and stream my movies and tv shows, and I want to be able to access them anywhere and share my content with people outside my network, the NAS was an unnecessarily expensive and frustrating solution. The stand-alone Plex server is perfect. Cheap and hassle free. 

 

I have 4 GB RAM and a Core2 duo 2.4ghz, with Vista. I can stream two 1080p videos to two different devices simultaneously with no pauses as long as one of the two videos don't need transcoding. If they both do, then I get some pausing. If I wanted to, I could easily upgrade the CPU and stream to the entire neighborhood. Vista handles backing up my media content to my backup drive on a weekly schedule in case of an HD failure. I use WD greens. If one of my HDs fail, or if a stick of RAM goes bad, it's a simple recovery.

 

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200375666-Stand-Alone-Server

 

Hope this helps?

[G+_Steve Kendel]

Well, Ron, you don't inspire a lot of confidence in me on this job. But, then again, you use Vista. LOL j/k

 

I just wanted something that was better than these external drives I keep buying. Something that I could use to store all my media on for playback through Plex on all my different devices. Something that I don't have to worry about what happened with the Seagate drive that just completely died last night. I suppose that I could continue to run the Plex server itself on my Windows machine and just use the FreeNAS box as a file holder and that is it. That would put all the heavy lifting of transcoding on the Windows box. Shouldn't need too much ram to do file transfers over the network.

 

I was hoping that I could set up a simple NAS running on a computer that I already own versus spending $400+ for a commercial NAS and drives. I figured I had half the cost covered if I could reuse this old computer. My ultimate goal was to have probably 3 or 4 drives in the computer set up in like a RAID 5 where I could lose one of the 4 and not lose all my data since the parity would be spread across the drives and could rebuild itself when the time came. A setup where I could just simply swap out the drive that died and not worry. This would all be done much farther into the future.

 

I was planning on starting out with maybe 1 or 2 drives and adding onto it as I went along. I don't even know if that is possible. I didn't know if there were rules that after you set up the NAS, you couldn't just add on to it whenever you felt like without having to restart everything from scratch and have to deal with the musical chairs of file movement to get everything situated properly.

 

But, in a nutshell, that is what I was wanting most of all. A way to store files in such a way that if one went belly-up I won't lose everything. Kinda like you get with a Drobo, but without the outrageous costs.

[G+_Steve Kendel]

Well, dang, guess no one else wants to chime in. Oh well. Was hoping Padre might say something or Norton. Oh well.

[G+_Ron Nichols]

Steve Kendel Hi Steve. Try hitting @padresj on Twitter with a link to your post. Sorry I could not be more helpful.

[G+_Steve Kendel]

Oh, not a real big deal. I guess you did help about as much as anyone can. Was just hoping more would offer up stuff. 

 

About the only other thing that wasn't really covered was about adding discs once you get it going. Not sure I really asked good enough questions about it. If I start off with one data drive, how hard is it to add more later? Can you just drop it in and add it to what you have? Or would it have to be a different mount point if not raiding it at that point? And what about if I have a drive with data on it, buy a couple more at some point, and want to put them in RAID 5? Would you have to pull all the data off the original to somewhere else while setting it up? Or is it something that could be done without loss of data?

 

I saw a Newegg sale for 3 WD Reds this weekend for $300, but I look at the reviews for the drive itself and got scared off with all the 1-egg ratings. Maybe Newegg just isn't a good place to buy drives from.

[G+_Arcturus Lancaster]

You can add volumes to free nas. You can not change raid modes (wanted to do this myself) you will want to add drives in at least pairs if you want redundant drives . raid5 needs at least 3 drives.