Filed under: Utilities, Open Source
FreeNAS: One-stop network-attached storage
I've often thought about dropping a
couple of hard drives in an old PC and using it as a network file server, but the task of setting up the OS and getting
things running seems daunting. FreeNAS, short for Free Network-Attached Storage,
looks like it might be the solution I'vee been looking for. It's a 15MB download that includes a FreeBSD OS, CIFS
(Samba), FTP, and NFS support, software RAID, and a web-based configuration interface. What's more, it'll boot from a
USB key.
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The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron said 4:42PM on 4-25-2006
Does anyone know if freenas supports large harddrives on old hardware which wouldn't normally be able to support it like naslite does?
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roulduke said 3:41PM on 6-11-2006
I was wondering if you have to fomat the hardrives you wan to use as your shares because I wan to run FreeNAS on a 6gig the have two other drives in the machine..
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bilbdonraa said 9:05AM on 1-23-2009
is there any way to embedd search engine into freenas?
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flerbs said 5:29PM on 7-17-2006
roulduke - in answer to your question, yes you do need to format the hard drives to use with freenas (which is done through the web UI, you should be fine running the os from the 6 gig hdd and use the other two for storage. my setup was almost the same, at first - i pulled a 6.4 gig drive from an old pc, installed the os on that and formatted the other two drives for raid. at the present time i have a compact flash ide adaptor with a 64mb card in for the os and 6 300gb hdds configured with software raid 5. this serves the purpose as a home nas server very well!
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Christopher Curtis said 2:20PM on 8-02-2006
I was woundering if any one knew if FreeNAS does or is going to offer support for SATA drive. Or could this possible be supported on the mother board of your choice? thanks
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Lex Polman said 10:19AM on 8-27-2006
I run FreeNAS 0.671 since 2 days now on an AMD Duron 950 MHz, with a 250 GB and a 200 GB HDD IDE for storage, although te bios reports drives of 136 GB. A GigaBit network card was added for high performance. Works great, I'm looking foreword to a FreeNAS version that provides user authorisation features.
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zrr said 1:09PM on 1-19-2006
Gentoo-Linux and Raid 5 work great. But do not use old Harddisk use new ones. After all you want play with your data and not with your Hardware.
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Whisky said 3:36PM on 1-19-2006
This looked really cool, but it looks like you need to connect the hard drives still onto a computer at all times and you can run the software from another hard drive of USB or CF device. But you still need the physical PC.
I thought I could find an enclosure for a hard drive and connect it to the network and have NAS
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Peter said 9:04PM on 1-24-2006
I tried this out and it works great! I build this on some 7 year old hardware we pulled and it's plenty fast for NAS use. It works great for cross-platform file storage.
Whisky - you can't just plug a hard drive into the network, you need some kind of OS behind it. That's what this does for you. But yes, you do need a physical computer. Throw a few 300 Gig drives together as a RAID 1 or 5 and you've got something way more reliable and flexible than a single external USB drive.
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