Hi people I am building a small fileserver/NAS/torrent box and want to utilize the SATA ports to the fullest. Therefore I was considering buying an IDE to CF adapter and a 16gb CF card. Will this be enough for a FreeNAS distro serving around 6 tb's of data, and a uTorrent installation? It wouldn't have to do much other than that to be honest.
.... if you have a cf card already then sure but wouldn't it be better with a thumbdrive you connect to onboard usb?
from when I was playing about with free nas your better of with a USB over a CF the foot print for free nas in 8.0.3 has been reduced a 6 or 8gb usb thumb drive is more than enough for 2 copy's of free nas if you need to update the version
I have FreeNAS v0.7.2 and it would fit on 1GB, although I have it on 4GB USB pendrive. Long ago I built an Atom based box for FreeNAS. I used one of these to connect the pendrive http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lycom-ub-109-internal-motherboard-header-2x5-pin-usb2-header-to-2-usb-sockets Neat The current version 8 requires 4GB as here: http://www.freenas.org/category/version-comparison An 8GB pendrive would be sensible choice. I was advised not all CF solutions were bootable.
The motherboard I am using is quite old and I don't think it supports booting from USB drives tbh but thanks for all of the answers.
How old are we talking? I got unraid to boot from a usb key on an old compaq athlon 64 from 7 years ago or so. I was surprised as i saw no options in the bios for booting from usb devices. If you have a usb key kicking around it is worth a punt. I can vouch for the cf readers though, we use them at work. Don't use cheap cf cards though, they caused us all sorts of headaches.
I will try with a USB drive for sure then. How cheap cards are we talking? I would use a 4 gig SanDisk Extreme or something like that.
We originally bought lexar x200 things. They didn't seem to be great. We now use integral x300 and they seem to work really well. Although they are around 30 quid instead of 8 but it is worth it.
Is running a file server OS on a flash drive going to be quick enough compared to a standard hard drive? I just got my parts for the Amahi file server I'm building and if I could run it off a flash drive that would let me use all 6 sata ports for storage.
You're not really going to be reading / writing for the USB drive for a file server, it's going to be the SATA drives that are in use. My FreeNAS machine runs off a USB drive and that's fine.
