Can it be done, maybe or maybe not... I am sharing my experience here, in hopes, it will help others, and at the same time, I can learn more too. The video is a VLOG of my thoughts and Ideas of a new FreeNAS project where I am using an old Dell PowerEdge 1900. My goal is to build a colossal File Server for all my Music Samples and Projects to live.

I decided to go with a Linux/FreeBSD based Distro (Yes, I know FreeBSD is not Linux), due to the cool features with the ZFS file system. In theory, it will work on older hardware, and I can keep the price of the budget down real low and use older hardware parts. In the future, I want to learn from this build and slowly upgrade to a more advanced system, with faster Pass-through SATA cards, bigger Hard-drives, and a 10GB Network throughput backplane, with the end-goal of a seamless low-latency network based Sample Drive.

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2019

FreeNAS is actually based on FreeBSD, not Linux. Both Linux and FreeBSD are kinds of UNIX.

In my experience, if you plan to load your kontakt samples off the server, performance will be pretty bad. Especially if you're used to loading them off a local SSD.

I use mine as a dumping ground, and copy what I want to work with at the time off onto the local drive.

 

- Yes, you are technically correct, but try to tell the US Southerners not to call Pepsi a Coke. I'm a big power user of pfSense, and I still call it a Linux box, even though I know it's a BSD based distro. I guess it's all in the semantics. I'll try to make sure I call a Pepsi cola a Pepsi next time.

- Right, however, network speeds have come a long way, and I am a firm believer this will change in the very near future, even with budget parts found on eBay. For example, I can take an older Sun Dual 40Gbps InfiniBand card, sells for under $30 US used on eBay, and use it in a friendly local SAN setup, Heck with the price of 10GB going down, I think it's even possible to do it with some LAG/Etherchannel config. Not trying to argue, I only see the optimism here.

- I agree, for now, this is all experimental and will be used as a nice backup drive and repository for my video work too, but it won't stop me from re-tweaking and eventually getting it to work correctly with faster speeds and better latency.