Noobie appraising NAS4Free & FreeNAS

[b1gb1ll]

Hi all

I just signed up after successfully installing NAS4Free for the first time.

I am a home user with probably (by comparison), a low end requirement, I am testing and appraising this and FreeNAS to decide which way to jump before I chuck some money at my build.

My basic needs are to provide a storage facility solely for my media (Movies; TV Shows; Music & Photos) which can then be streamed to various devices within the home (PC; Laptop; Raspberry Pi; iPads & iPhones) using XBMC or Plex and also away from the home using Plex.

I don't really know what kind of data traffic you would consider this to be, I have read about such things as 'random reads' 'large chunks of data' 'steady writes' etc, etc, etc.

I would have probably 500 GB of existing media to load up in one shot once I get stable, followed by new data as and when acquired, at say, movies 1 GB each, music albums 75 MB each, TV Show 200 MB each, photos 500 MB per batch.

A couple of questions, being very new to servers in general and certainly FreeBSD & Unix, a great deal of this is going over my head at the moment and I find paper copies of user manuals etc, much easier to read & follow, is there a way to get a downloadable/printable version of the user guide/manual?

Also any advice specifically on UFS versus ZFS and optimum choice of RAID config for the above scenaio would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[armandh]

NAS4Free is great for streaming video, backing up computers, etc

a lot will depend on the capability of the devices receiving the stream.
some times with a big .Mkv file I will reduce the size of the VLC player window
to compensate for the HTPC's not quite good enough video. [an old HP DX-5150]

the actual streaming takes very little effort
a large Mkv one hour TV program that takes 90 seconds to transfer out
will take 1/40 th of the same capability to stream the program out over one hour.

if you need to trans code to a different file format on the fly
it could take a lot more computer than trans coding B4 storing
but that leaves viewing hardware with more capability less than fully utilized.

streaming to off premise, here the trouble begins [not with the N4F]
the up link speeds of my connection to the net are like most homes [not much]
they are asymmetrical in the extreme just enough to send up the URL or some text e-mail
sent a big file and it takes forever compared to Gb lan inside the home
Not like the local library which has down speeds similar to mine but up speeds 3X greater than the down.

IMHO it is better to use some cloud space for this part; one slow up and down as needed.