Back in this thread I laid out the specs of a PC I bought at work that I wanted to make into a gaming machine. That never happened, but I still have the machine. To refresh for the link-averse, it’s a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with a 365W power supply.
Could I put in a 2TB or 3TB HDD, then install FreeBSD and FreeNAS on this to make an easy NAS to link to my Windows-based machines? I recently converted all of my mom’s old VHS home movies to digital files, and they’re taking up most of my 1TB external drive. Couple that with the gigs upon gigs of pictures I have of my kids, and I’m starting to see the need for a big digital storage container.
Has anyone built something like this from an old desktop?
Plenty of times. The latest incarnation is an old laptop running Samba and a Plex Server on Ubuntu. Samba for the Windows machines, and Plex for the streaming devices.
The circa-2008 C2D is a bit weak for Plex video, which transcodes everything on the fly, but it has more than enough grunt to serve music over Plex and video files over SMB.
You said FreeBSD and FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a Linux OS based on FreeBSD so I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish if that wasn’t a typo. Admitted, this is my first forray into Linux so I could be missing something simple.
The only other immediate item of note about FreeNAS is that the drive being shared can’t be the OS drive. I stuck an old 80gig drive in for the OS to share the terabyte data drive. Would probably work to just set aside a small partition for OS and the rest for data but I can’t confirm that.
Correction to the correction: FreeBSD isn’t Linux. It’s a BSD variant.
If this is your first foray into a Unix-like operating system (other than OSX), you may want to skip FreeNAS and go with a Linux-based system, like vanilla Ubuntu or Xubuntu. Because of their larger user base, they’re far more likely to have drivers available (and pre-installed) for any weird hardware you might have, and their installers are relatively easy and intuitive.
There are also gajillions of easy-to-follow howto’s available on setting up filing services.
Oh, I thought that FreeBSD was the OS and FreeNAS was the NAS software. I’ve just been skimming articles about it while at work today, so I haven’t looked into it in too much detail.
It’s good to know about needing the smaller drive, though. I can probably get a 40 GB for cheap here at work just for the OS.
If I overclock the processor I have to increase media-sharing capabilities, do I put the hard drive at risk in the event of a failure? I haven’t done any hardcore PC building in over a decade, and I’m not sure what the risks are of overclocking anymore.
Keep in mind linux or FreeBSD is pretty small - you can install the actual OS on something like a 4gb USB stick or an SD card. If you are concerned about your data you want RAID 1 and backups. Overclocking your processor won’t have anything to do with the hard drive failing or not failing unless it means you are heating up your whole case to extreme temperatures.
FreeNAS will work just fine on that machine, and it is dead easy to set up. You will have a nice web interface to work with and will not have to mess with the machine directly.
That said, I agree with others that a simple Ubuntu server would be easy to get going (with some basic Linux skills) and you could do some neat stuff with it, like setting up a Plex server and so on.
If you want to try prepackaged foolproof Ubuntu installations of various applications, give TurnKey Linux a try. They have drop-in “appliances” that you can burn to disc and then install on a bare machine, just like FreeNAS, and they provide the more popular Ubuntu underpinnings. Slide on over to the TurnKey site and see what stuff they have to offer.
Hm. So, if I want to use it to store all of the pictures, music, and videos from all of my other networked devices, I should think about using Ubuntu instead?
I’ve heard of Plex on Lifehacker, but I thought it was inferior and harder to use than XBMC. If I’m using Plex and I pop in a video card with HDMI-out, can I hook this server up to my TV? Or am I then adding too much to a machine that should primarily be used for storage?
Plex is all about using one device as a server and other devices to display the video.
I have a small box, like yours, serving up Plex. In my house we have a Roku box on the main TV that is running the Plex channel. We also have Plex clients installed on each person’s laptop, Plex client on my iMac, and Plex clients on all iPads and iPhones. We often have 3 people watching different movies or shows off the same Plex server with no issues.
The sweet thing is, when I’m in a hotel on the road, I can watch any of my shows or movies using my iPad, served up from my home Plex server.