I finally found some time to make some progress on my NAS. I removed all four drives from the bottom of the box and started the FreeNAS installation again.
Everything went fine, the system installed successfully and after rebooting and inserting all the hard drives, it recognised them correctly.
There was a problem setting up the samba share, but it all worked out in the end. The Wireguard connection was set up very quickly and worked on the first try.
I tried writing about 20 gigabytes and everything worked fine. The transfer speeds are not very fast (around 2mb/s), but I think the bottleneck is my router, which is very old.
However, I think this speed is enough for me and it will cover my needs perfectly.
I am still thinking about adding more RAM. The recommendation is 8GB, but I only have 4GB. However, everything works fine and there is still about 1GB of RAM available when I am writing to or reading from the hard drive.
Maybe I will decide later if I find out that I "definitely" need to run more services on this server.
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I have been thinking about building a NAS for years. Two weeks ago I bought the 7th generation HP Microserver. It has an AMD processor, 4GB of RAM and space for four hard drives.
It also has a slot for a CD/DVD drive, which I found completely useless. The first thing I did was to 3D print a "reduction" for another drive to fit into that bay.
It fits absolutely perfectly, there are pins that fit exactly into the holes for the screws in the HDD and then you are able to push it onto the shaft.
The server now has 5 HDDs, 1TB each. So one should be for system and unimportant stuff, and the other four I have joined to RAIDz2, so I have 2Tb of space for my data.
The main purpose for this server is to store family photos, videos and other documents, so I think the space is big enough.
I installed TrueNAS and configured everything I wanted. After some research I set it up to connect via SMB and it worked.
However, after copying about 5GB of data at standard speed, it then dropped to cca 100-300 kb/s. I have tried rebooting the server, rebooting the router, rebooting my PC ...
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Yup, after many years, it is finaly here. I am launching my own blog, to complain about everything and I can rarely brag with the projects that are going fine.
I can bet, that whe complains will be the most common topic of my articles, but we will see
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