Thanks for the update and glad to hear it is positive overall.
In general, I'm pretty happy with the purchase. From a hardware standpoint, there hasn't been a lick of trouble -- though that other thread is a reminder that I really should check the drive temps. I haven't looked at them at all. I have the 4 drives in a Z2 array (2 drive redundancy). Aside from the power supply issue, everything went into the case just fine, but it's a *really* tight fit for the mobo. There is not a lot of space. The fans are quiet enough that I've never noticed them while working in the office. The drives make more noise than the fans, IMO, but I have tinnitus, so maybe I just don't notice.
I would imagine that the 8-bay case with 2 x 120mm fans should be pretty quiet and keep the drives nice and cool too. If I remember correctly, that mobo has PWM fan controllers so you should be able to slow the fans down if required. The 4-bay case only has the one fan but I think it should still be OK. I would say the noisiest fan would be the small one in the PSU.
On the software side, it's been a mixed bag. The two sore points for me: 1) configuring it to use as a print server, and 2) crashplan.
snip...
Other than that, I'm happy on the software side, too.
After checking out the FreeNAS forums, I stumbled across NAS4Free which is a fork of the original FreeNAS. Judging by the comments on
this blog, N4F is considerably less resource-intensive than FN but at the cost of limited functionality eg plugins.
The plex server plugin works just fine. I've had no issue streaming/transcoding H.265 videos to an ipad. Setting up jails, storage, users, snapshot schedules, etc is easy too. It would be nice if there were a simple button to set up recommended snapshot intervals for a data set, but that's a pretty minor point.
That is good news about the transcoding, I understand H.265 is pretty intensive to transcode? The lack of this sort of functionality is why N4F has lower hardware requirements.
For example, I needed to tell her mac book to index the NAS drives, so that she could use Spotlight.
How do you achieve this, I would like to use Spotlight on my current Synology NAS too?
From the standpoint of using the box as a NAS, it's been a set-n-forget operation, just as I'd hoped. It just sits there, ticking away.
That's how it should be!
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