Question 1

why this and not a qnap? what is the difference?

Accepted Answer

I have a QNAP (TS-421 @ $500) and actually just bought the Mini @ $1000 a couple of months ago.   You don't mention what you are comparing the Mini against but it should be the QNAP TS-470 Pro.   That said, the QNAP QTS interface is very simple where the FreeNAS is not as refined.  For the money, the Mini specs are very good and I felt the Mini was a better value than the 470.  Also, using ZFS and having error correcting ram, help to keep your data clean.I can also say that the Mini easily handles my media needs.  At the same time (with Plex), I've streamed  2 1080 movies to 2 TVs, a 720 movie to a computer and a 480 movie to an android device.  The Mini CPU usage  was at about 50%.

Question 2

Do the ZIL and L2ARC upgrades take up a hard drive bay, or do they have their own dedicated spots inside the FreeNAs Mini?

Accepted Answer

Ok I had one of these units the operating system on this runs off of a DOM (Disk On Module) that plugs into a sata port on the motherboard. There are 4 hard drive openings for 2.5 or 3.5 sata hard drives. There is also one internal mounting point for a 2.5" ssd (for the ZIL upgrade). So to answer your question NO it does not have to use up any of the four main hard drive slots. The motherboard they use on this is ASRock C2550D4I that is unless they changed the spec. I hope these answers are useful. Also check out nas4free it's the original project that freenas is based off of.

Question 3

Hardware Compatibility List Hard Disks For this NAS Device?

Accepted Answer

We recommend (and sell) WD Red Drives for NAS devices using SATA.  You may have good results with other SATA drives, but we are naturally unable to qualify everything on the market.  The WD Red product is also specifically intended for NAS usage, whereas a SATA desktop drive is not.

Question 4

How many LAN ports it has?

Accepted Answer

The freenas mini has 2 lan ports for networking and a 3rd for management. The ipmi (management port) gets bound to the lan ports and has it's own ip. It's pretty good because you can actually control your frenas mini from another computer from through ipmi. The freenas mini has a marvel raid chipset with 6 ports (sata 6gbs) and an intel chipset that has (2 sata 6gbs ports) and (4 3gbs ports) overall it's a good unit. I personally prefer my Synology nas unit. I hope this answer helped.

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FreeNAS Mini (Diskless) - 4 Bay Compact NAS Storage with ZFS. 8-Core 2.4GHz Processor, 16GB RAM

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