FreeNAS/DIYNAS on Socket 754 (Athlon 64)

Sorry if this isn't "that" vintage but I figured there would be a lot of knowledgable people here. I have an AOpen AK86-L with an Athlon 64 2200+ (IIRC) that I was going to use in a FreeNAS box. It looks like FreeNAS needs a 64-bit CPU these days, so that's fine, but "strongly" recommends 8GB RAM for any of the recent versions. My board supports max 3GB of DDR1 (which I have on hand) in three slots, so that's not happening.

I have two drives I want to mirror in RAID1. Should I:
- dig up whatever ancient version of FreeNAS doesn't want so much RAM
- load a lightweight Linux distro and make my own RAID server (probably using EXT4 instead of ZFS), or
- hunt down and shell out for some slightly newer hardware to run FreeNAS 9.x? Is it worth paying extra to run 9.x over old versions?

(For comparison my "modern" GAMES MACHINE is a Core2Duo with 8GB RAM and it's by far the most powerful desktop I have.)

Thoughts, suggestions, etc. appreciated.

Find something newer. In the era of $60 BayTrail boards, its easy to find something cheap and fast... and more importantly LOW POWER to run a FreeNAS.

I'd look for a Socket AM3+ board with a BIOS known to support ECC RAM, and then build a system with ECC RAM.

That's what I use for my FreeNAS ZFS box.

There were some papers written about the impact of a cosmic ray bit flip on ZFS, and it's not good. You really want ECC RAM for ZFS. Intel doesn't allow it on any of their regular desktop boards.

MarsMan2020 said:

I'd look for a Socket AM3+ board with a BIOS known to support ECC RAM, and then build a system with ECC RAM.

That's what I use for my FreeNAS ZFS box.

There were some papers written about the impact of a cosmic ray bit flip on ZFS, and it's not good. You really want ECC RAM for ZFS. Intel doesn't allow it on any of their regular desktop boards.

Click to expand...

Like the one I JUST SOLD (along with 8GB non-ECC) because I upgraded the system it was in to a C2D?

Honestly if I'm buying new components (again!) my FreeNAS box will become considerably less free... any reason not to just buy this instead? http://www.usedvictoria.com/classified-ad/RAIDON-NAS-_27181085 (the datasheet explicitly says it supports the drives I'm using BTW.)