I built a freenas box out of old parts from my previous gaming rig. Using just 1 wd red 3tb, i soon after wanted a second drive for a mirror set up, could not figure out how to go from stripped to mirrored so i just wiped the pool and remade it from scratch as a 2 3tb mirror pool. Since i am using an old z77 mobo and non ecc ram, when i decide to upgrade the system to a ecc supporting mobo will i be able to just do a mobo swap and plug the usb stick in and boot like normal or will i need to rebuild my pool?
and why is the ecc ram so important? its really just a plex/minecraft server do my blurays need ecc?
Whoever tells you that either has no idea what they're talking about or know too much (as in work with actual servers). For a home server you don't need ecc. You are not going to run sophisticated programs that do fancy calculations where no errors are critical. You are just storing data and using basic OS stuff.
My windows home server (will switch to Nas4free soon, a light weight linux nas distro) ran on dual pentium 3 1ghz and 2gb of SDRAM 133. I also have ECC sticks at slower speeds and they make no difference in use, and in theory should perform worse, but it doesn't matter cause it's a server. My setup has 6tb of sata drives using a pci adapter and many IDE drives totaling 1.5Tb. For some reason FreeNAS has very high system requirements in my opinion for a home server, but that's because it's much more flexible than WHS2007/2011.
I'd say windows home server should be the first option for hassle free NAS needs for the average user.
It's been a breeze to configure everything from the pretty control pannel gui in any windows PC in the network and schedule backups and shutdowns (and even wol).
I might not have the best answer but from my understanding is that the ZFS checksums your data, and it checksums the metadata used by ZFS and the ECC ram is recommended so it will correct single bit errors on the fly.
If you plan on just using non-ecc ram then I would most definitely do some more homework on if you think it best practice or not and how much do you really care about the movies/other files you plan on having on your freenas box.
Hope I was able to make some things clear and if not then I'll do some homework and see what I can find.
This ecc problem is a hindrance and shouldn't exist for the average joe who just wants a free fast server OS. Instead of wasting money and time to make a server work with a certain software, I recommend just going with Openmediavault or any linux distro and use SAMBA + FTP + whatever tools you need.
As do many filesystems. ECC has nothing to do with filesystems doing check-sums. The file system has no way of knowing if whats in ram is correct, regardless if thats zfs, xfs, btrfs, or ntfs.
If your only consideration for ECC ram is because your using ZFS and people say you need ECC then you dont need ECC. If you did need ECC youd be using it regardless of the file system you were using.
If @EZLTheGreat 's motherboard supported it then getting ECC wouldn't be much of a money waste (ecc ram has really come down in price since the sdram days). Changing the whole platform is a bit ineffective.
im still confused about hardware upgrades, I love the idea of the lifetime server but am very confused about how these zfs pools work when it comes to adding drives and upgrading hardware like mobo cpu and ram the manual on the freenas site has tons of info but i cannot make heads or tails of it and i am not an idiot, it seems like if i want to add drives i need triple the drives i am currently using so i can make the double size pool then move the data from the old pool to the new one, but then what? do i just stick the original drives up my butt? it seem like you need a ton of drives all at once, if i add drives it will be 1 at a time over a few months, and i just dont see that working without moving all the data to my main pc over the network and then clearing the drives and just making the zfs pool again, is there a better solution for a simple plex server using an old gaming rig?
I like what you have said here. Now that you have pointed that out it does make more since here. Is why I said that I might not have the best answer. Really up to what @EZLTheGreat wants to do with this NAS.
I have never tested Non-ECC and ECC RAM on a Freenas box personally so I wouldn't know. Just going off of what is recommend from the Freenas guys.
You can change the entire server and still keep your pools. Just replace whatever part you wish and boot up the system. It will automatically find your pools and mount them. If you also do a reinstall of Freenas you'll have to import the pools manually. This is very easy and is done through the web GIU. I bought a new server last week and everything worked beautifully :)
Changing the number of drives in a pool is not so easy. Not sure you can do it all.
If your only consideration for ECC ram is because your using ZFS and people say you need ECC then you dont need ECC. If you did need ECC youd be using it regardless of the file system you were using.
ZFS is not an ideal file system for most uses. It has very high overhead and really is only useful for periodic snapshots and helping prevent bitrot. If you're not going to take the precautions to make sure ZFS works as intended, then don't bother with it.
Ecc is recommended becuae zfs and freenas is pushed as an enterprise product and data integrity is important at every stage for some people. Zfs is a good file system and if your data is extremely important then use ecc alomg wiyh it but use it everywhere that data is.
Zfs won't complain or fail to function if you don't have ecc ram.
I'm not disagreeing with you but only add this, ECC memory when used in FreeNas is for a couple purposes as far as I understand one is of course for bit rot or bit flip the other is for de-duplication (which is also where the recommended memory of 1g per terabyte comes from) but it really comes down to how important is your data? for mission critical data storage you'll want to follow all the best practices that are recommended, but if your data doesn't carry that type of importance then you can do pretty much whatever you like and roll the dice, worst case is your gonna' loose the data that your storing or you could witness some data corruption, or it could be just fine and never cause you any problems at all.
I run two FreeNas servers one is a media server that does not have ECC memory in it, there's nothing on this server I couldn't live without, yeah it would suck to loose some of it but not the end of the world either, it's been running about 8 months now has reads and writes, deletes every day and has no issues at all. The second server does house critical files but the server acts as a network convenience storage location for workstations. The data is backed up to two other locations and the FreeNas file server does not have ECC memory in it either because the data stored there is redundant.
FreeNas does not need ECC memory to operate, it is a safe guard, and another tool to help ensure data integrity but even with ECC memory you can still have data corruption, it's the old adage of garbage in = garbage out. ECC memory is a a very good idea, if your hardware supports it and you have the need for error correction then by all means use it, if your spec'in out hardware for a NAS and your OS is FreeNas then you'd be foolish to not add the extra protection ECC memory offers because after the fact you never really know just what type of data you will be storing in the future.
If your going for a FreeNas install because of the functionality, in my case I use it for several reasons, first being a software raid which has it's benefits, second I use FreeNas because of the jails, third I use FreeNas as a media server and content aggregation device that includes Sabnzbd, SickRage, CouchPotato, and Plex as a frontend, I don't have to use ZFS but choose to because of the features it offers in a software raid filesystem these features are not dependent on ECC memory but are enhanced by the use of ECC memory.
I could have just as easily built a media server on Linux and ran XFMC as a front end and BTRFS as a file system, but I wanted to use Unix/BSD, I wanted the redundancy of a software raid disk pool, and I wanted to learn about FreeNas, no better way to learn then to run one.
I think there is a lot of misinformation about the overhead, my media server runs on a Intel Atom (C2550) CPU with 16g of DDR3, nothing special just your basic workstation low end hardware, it uses 5 WD red NAS drives in a raid Z2 configuration, it can stream to multiple devices at the same time with no problems.