Hello

[cgethycx]

I am completely new to any kind of NAS or raid setup. I have done a bit of "shopping" around for an easy to manage solution to help eliminate the loss of my data. I feel that my search is over now. FreeNAS seams to have all of the features that I need ready go out of the box. My hello/introduction is more of a plea to forgive my noobness for the inevitable "stupid" questions that I will be asking. It is also a pledge to use the search function as much as possible. It is just hard to search for something when you don't know the terminology for what you are searching for. LOL. Thanks in advance for the tolerance, patience, and help I am sure to revive. OK that is the end of my butt kissing. :-P

[ProtoSD]

Hi Cgethycx,

Welcome to the forums, glad your search for a solution is over! Searching the forums can be a bit of a pain sometimes, even when I search for something I know I've seen it doesn't always show up in the results. Something that can help with that is using google to search the forums instead, like this:

your-search-words site:forums.freenas.org

You can even add the username of the person that posted if you remember seeing that as part of your search terms. Anyway, it seems like you're not one of those people that justs asks without at least some effort to search. There are just topics that have been covered so many times its hard not to miss in a search and you can tell when someone hasn't tried.

Good Luck!

PS - Check out some of the links in my signature for documentation, FAQs, and videos etc.!

[cgethycx]

Thanks for pointing out your links. The videos have inspired me to create a virtualbox set up first to learn on as I have not yet purchased any of my hardware yet.

[ProtoSD]

That's an excellent way to get started. You need to make sure your virtual disks are AT LEAST 4 or 5 GB, FreeNAS reserves 2GB of each disk for swap space.