Well, following on from all the good advice received here https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...replacing-a-synology-nas-with-a-server.29669/ , we ditched the idea of resurrecting an old enterprise server and set out on the 'roll your own' route. We're almost there.
Hardware comprises:
The components were chosen because they were available to us and either cheap or free rather than as a result of some great plan.
Assembly of the hardware was easy enough with the first snag only arising when we came to boot up for the first time. The motherboard uses UEFI rather than BIOS, something we consider e retrograde step. Under BIOS it was easy enough to assign the desired boot sequence to the appropriate drives but we always struggle with UEFI. Eventually, after much cursing of whoever invented the UEFI, we managed to get it to recognise the USB port as first boot device and installed FreeNAS onto a 120 Gb Kingston SDD. That's the smallest drive we had to hand and so was selected to host the OS. Installation of FreeNAS seemed to proceed exactly as it should (or at least exactly in line with the You Tube tutorial) and so we rebooted the hardware to bring the server online.
Eventually, after much further struggling with UEFI , we got it to ignore the USB port and boot from the Kingston SSD. Did we mention how much we prefer the old BIOS ? Back at our main pc, we opened up a web browser and called up the FreeNAS log in screen. User name and password were input and FreeNAS opened up for us.
Now the learning begins...
Hardware comprises:
- CFI A2059 Mini-ITX Chassis (https://static.mini-itx.com/store/images/3884-01L.jpg)
- 300 watt Be Quiet Silent SFX-300W PSU 80 Plus
- i5-3470 CPU,
- 8GB Samsung RAM,
- ASUS P8H61-I R2.0 Motherboard
The components were chosen because they were available to us and either cheap or free rather than as a result of some great plan.
Assembly of the hardware was easy enough with the first snag only arising when we came to boot up for the first time. The motherboard uses UEFI rather than BIOS, something we consider e retrograde step. Under BIOS it was easy enough to assign the desired boot sequence to the appropriate drives but we always struggle with UEFI. Eventually, after much cursing of whoever invented the UEFI, we managed to get it to recognise the USB port as first boot device and installed FreeNAS onto a 120 Gb Kingston SDD. That's the smallest drive we had to hand and so was selected to host the OS. Installation of FreeNAS seemed to proceed exactly as it should (or at least exactly in line with the You Tube tutorial) and so we rebooted the hardware to bring the server online.
Eventually, after much further struggling with UEFI , we got it to ignore the USB port and boot from the Kingston SSD. Did we mention how much we prefer the old BIOS ? Back at our main pc, we opened up a web browser and called up the FreeNAS log in screen. User name and password were input and FreeNAS opened up for us.
Now the learning begins...