Just finished a month of traveling to Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, and Kansas City. I’m glad to be home and ready to take a brake from out of town work for a few weeks. Waiting for me when I got home was everything I ordered for the Freenas build. One change I made to the parts list while I was on the road was an upgrade to 16gb of ram. Newegg had a 24 hour sale and the price was to good to pass up.

The Intel Core i3 and ECS H61H2-M2 Mother board was very easy to install and Freenas had no problem supporting the on board NIC. The only problem I ran into was that the motherboard wouldn’t recognize the USB dvd drive I was trying to use and I ended up having to plug in an old Sata DVD drive to get the install to work. Also I made the mistake of ordering a Micro ATX power supply instead of a ATX12 power supply so I had to make a mounting bracket to get the thing to fit in the case.

I went ahead and installed 2 500gb drives to test out network speeds. File transfers on my laptop through an Ethernet cable are hitting 55MB/s writes and 65MB/s reads which seems to be mostly limited by hard drive speeds. However the NIC on my desktop seems to be locking in at 100Mb which is limiting it to about 10 to 12MB/s file transfers. I wasn’t able to get my desktop motherboard NIC to jump up to 1000Mb speeds so I went ahead and ordered a stand alone PCI-e 1Gb Ethernet card it should show up tomorrow along with 4 3tb Seagate drives. I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews on Seagate’s 3tb drives so I went ahead and spent the extra to get Amazon’s extended 3 year warranty.

With the limited amount of testing I’ve done so far, the Freenas setup is fast enough to edit a video project right from the network with out any problems. It seems like the configuration has more then enough power to handle constant use from my laptop. I’ll run some more tests once the PCI-e 1Gb Ethernet card shows up for my desktop, but so far I’ve very happy with the setup. I think with the right drive configuration this could easily saturate 1Gb Ethernet speeds.

I’ll keep you posted on how the project works out. It’s good to be back.

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