Tearful greetings from the swamp of WD ShareSpace

[ShaunBlake]

I've "enjoyed" a ShareSpace NAS for years (2007) and have just come to a cliff: my NAS isn't -- I've had to mount it to one of my (Windows) computers, and stage files between the slug and my other devices. Today I stumbled on a thread about building a NAS (which referred to FreeNAS) and I've discovered that that light in the tunnel isn't a train after all.

Please be gentle and patient with me! I'm Irish, so my feelings are very tender, don'tcha know! <grin>

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

 

[danb35]

Welcome! Beware of guides that talk about repurposing your 15-year-old 486 to run FreeNAS; that won't do it. FreeNAS likes reasonably-modern, server-grade hardware, but fortunately that can be had rather inexpensively. The current bang-for-buck leader appears to be the HP Proliant ML10, currently $180 at TigerDirect. Add an 8 GB stick of RAM and whatever storage drives you want to use, and you're pretty well set.

 

[ShaunBlake]

... Beware of guides that talk about repurposing your 15-year-old 486 to run FreeNAS; that won't do it...

Thanks, that's great to know.

hmm... guess I ought to throw out those 386 and the 286 computers I've got...

 

[davidgreystahl]

I had a lot of fun building from scratch. You can get pretty cheap systems with fairly modern architecture. My experience is that CPU is not the bottleneck (at least not for home use). You do want to be on a Gigabit network. My unmanaged network switch (netgear) was quite old and a 1GB switch wasn't too expensive. 1000MBits is much better than 100MBits. Do wish the Computer Hardware/Networking establishment would drop the bit rates and just provide Bytes per second - 8 times better.