FreeNas build

Im planning on building a Freenas box from my parents old pc. The parts I've got on hand are...
Motherboard HP AAHD2-HY with an AMD A4-3400
RAM 4GB 1333
PSU EVGA 80+ Bronze 600W
Case Thermaltake Chaser A21
HDD 1 500GB HGST (this is temporary until I have the money for more drives)

This build is just to get started with Frenas everything stored on this NAS is stored on a separate drive in a separate computer Will these parts be sufficient for basic nas duties? Will these parts even work with Freenas? Im completely new to Freenas so thanks in advance for your help!

Needs at least 8gbs of RAM

you don't NEED 8GBs, but it is much prefered. That plus ECC. But if you are just building it to play around with and learn then that will be fine, however I wouldn't recommend that for vital data backup

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FreeNas needs 8GB of ram to run. but if you just need basic file storage then look into OpenMediaVauit. Its what i use for my server. My server has 1.75GB of ram and i have never seen it exceed 10% total usage.

http://www.openmediavault.org/

Not entirely correct.

FreeNAS recommends at least 8GB. Its not a requirement. You may need to do some performance tuning with < 4GB of ram though.

s: http://web.freenas.org/images/resources/freenas9.2.1/freenas9.2.1_guide.pdf

thats nice to know. might try it one my server later. thanks

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I was mostly worried about the 8GB of ram most of the videos I watched they had 8+. I forgot to ask but will I be able to just add more drives in the future and for ZFS do I need to add drives in pairs or triplets?

The 8 GB recommendation is one of those where, it will in theory wor with less, but if you want FreeNAS to work as a reliable NAS don't install less. But if you want to play around, it willl install and boot with 4GB. I think FreeNAS only needs 8GB for certain RAID configurations like ZFS.

If I understood it correctly you cannot add new drives to the same volume. You will need to create a new one and each needs a minimum of 3 drives depending on what type of ZFS you select.

Short answer? Yes. Go with it.

And brace yourself for the joys of the freenas community forum!

If I have 3 2tb drives in ZFS do I need 6GB of RAM for those drives or is is 1 GB of RAM per 1TB of useable storage?

Paul did a video a while ago where he built a NAS, I don't remember exactly when it was or how much ram they said to use... just go to the part with Logan and itll tell u.

So I installed Freenas however my computer refuses to boot from the Freenas installation. I tried it on an 8GB USB 2.0 drive and a 120GB ssd I had. Any ideas as to what the problem could be?

I couldn't get Freeness to boot so I tried open media vault and thats pretty much what I was looking for with out zfs support but I can live with that for now. Thanks for the suggestion of using OMV!

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Your Welcome.