 We have a FreeNAS Mini. Yes. It's got nice handles too. It's boxed really nice. We actually haven't actually unboxed this yet, so it's an actual unboxing. Usually I unbox it and put it all back in the box, and if you decide this time, because we had time to film while we needed to get this with the unboxing, we did cut the tape. I did. I want to make sure it was in there. I want to make sure the thing is in here. It appears to be in here. They come with the FreeNAS Mini Accessories box, which has a power cable and ethernet cable and some screws with some really nice foam. This is all... Is that for like if they ship it with drives? Yeah, if they ship it with hard drives, they do have... Oh, that's fancy. We ordered this without hard drives in terms of expediency for the client. We got these HGST four terabyte DESTAR NAS drives. This thing is packaged really nice. This is actually really nice because the way these trays are and everything else. We're going to be installing these drives in it for the review. It's mini. This is going to a customer. Like the size of the box. It is relatively mini by comparison. Wow. This is nice. Ooh, plastic off. Oh yeah, the keys are in the... The keys are in the accessory box. I mean the keys. It's got dual network supports, it looks like. It does. Triple network ports. Triples. And a USB and a VGA and a council. So we have on the back here, like he said, we've got three network ports on here. USB, council, very cool. VGA out in case you care what's on the screen, you want to see it in VGA. Sometimes it gets stuck and you want to know why. Tamper resistant. They do have a sticker on it. That means we're not supposed to open it. Should we open it? Oh, door was open. Door was open already. We will open it. I want to open it. We'll open it and dig inside for you so we can start really covering what's inside of here. So we have the FreeNAS Mini all set up, configured, unboxed, and tested. Actually, we plugged it all in, set it up last night after we unboxed it. Me and Steve were just excited to get it open. And it works great. So far we haven't had any issues. I don't expect to have any issues. If you're not familiar with IAC systems, like I am, they make a lot of really good choices on hardware. I really well put together a machine here. So let's dive into some of the details. We even saw four of these Deathstar NAS drives. I didn't say Deathstar, Deskstar NAS. These are really good drives. I've used these in the past. For the particular job, the four four terabyte drive is completely adequate based on the storage needs of this customer. And it will definitely be well performing for what they want to do for some basic file storage. It's actually going to a graphics design company that this is big enough for them right now. And I want to get this off the rip because this is everyone's question. This runs FreeNAS. This has ZFS. ZFS is amazing. It's ultra reliable. I have a series of videos on it. We've had Michael Lucas on here who didn't just write the book on ZFS. He wrote two of them. And there's a lot of reasons the enterprise market loves ZFS. The reason consumers sometimes have a problem with it, or I've even heard it called the hidden cost of ZFS, is what if I only want to buy two drives now and then buy two drives later? You can't easily expand a single ZFS column and you can't easily expand into two more drives. They end up not being part of the same array. You can make an array with two drives and another array with two drives. So it is best from a planning standpoint that if you plan to put four drives in it, buy the four drives you want. Don't buy two now, two later because you'd have to reset the drives up to build them. This is, so to speak, a disadvantage that some people see it from ZFS, but from all the reliability and portability and features you get with ZFS. That's a sacrifice I think is completely worth the trade-off of not being able just to magically drop a drive in and expand your array. So without going any further down that rat hole, that at least wanted to clear up. Because that's always the first question if you're new to ZFS or new to Freenast, those questions come up. So these drives are installed and working. The box is actually turned on right now. And I have it turned on because I wanted to showcase the fact that it's not very loud. And that's an important aspect because being that this is kind of targeted at the small business market, they don't necessarily have a back server room this would be in. And maybe it just sits within the office there. If you're working from home or maybe you're a YouTuber and just need something next to your office to do some storage. You can have this running and still record a video obviously. And because of one of the features of ZFS, even though it's on, we will improperly shut it down. Because as I've done in my how to kill a ZFS drive video, it's very, very fault tolerant, which is one of the biggest advantages of there. Because ultimately, I mean you should always have a backup of your data, but you really want a fault tolerant system because unexpected things happen, people randomly unplug stuff. You don't want a drive failure or a power outage to be a catalyst for cash traffic failure outside of there. Now, we're going to go ahead and open up the front, which is held on by a magnet, which is nice. It stays closed easy. So even if you tilt this around or something, the door is not just going to flop open. It's on a unlevel shelf. They really nice design on this case. It actually comes apart really easy. We're going to go ahead and cut the seal and open it up. So one other thing is we took this on and off a couple of times. That's important that you have a case with a good fit and finish. It's actually really easy. I'll even demonstrate it real quick here. Putting the case back on does not require special alignment skills like some of them have in the past. And away we go, it's back on, even from the back sitting down where I'm not looking over it. The fit and finish has just done really nice on this. Please leave the case slid on. It is part of the airflow. This has a single fan at the back. One for the power supply, but one single larger fan to bring airflow from the front back to keep the drives cool. These are 7,200 rpm drives. They run a little bit warmer than your 5,400 rpm drives. So you want to make sure you have adequate cooling. Now the Freenast Mini is powered by an octa-core Atom processor, the C2750. And inside we have an ASRock board. Now this is the ASRock slash ASRack board, which means it has IPMI for offline management. This is really cool and we'll get into that when we cover the software. Now there are a set of keys so you can lock the front cage to keep the fingers out. Maybe kids who like to touch things. And the drives themselves are individually lockable. Now the sleds that these came in are not tool-less. And before some of you go, but why not? I gotta admit, tool-less ones sometimes are a little bit fidgety. Not that you take the drives out very often. But when you slide them in, sometimes they don't line. You gotta wiggle a little and they'll slide in. It depends on some of the tool-less designs. These are super smooth. It feels like they have Teflon on them or something. These drives slide in and out really, really well. Also if you plan to prep this and ship this to a customer, the drives have a handy little tray that you can set them in while they're in the sled. So if we were to get this and then ship it to a client, or if you were to order this freeing ass with drives, you can fit them right in here. Which I thought was a really nice feature, being able to just take the drives out and set them in here and box it all back up. The packaging's really nice. This is one of the first things it noticed and it just keeps getting better from there. Now let's dig a little bit more into what's inside here. So this is a mini ITX board so it is an ASRock. It is not some proprietary board. This is a nice feature. This has 16 gigs of ECC RAM. It is expandable so you have two more slots. We have a pair of 8's in there. You could put a couple more if you wanted. The network card's in the back. We have two Intel-based network cards. And then a third network port for management, not part of your standard OS networking. And like I said, we'll cover the offline management. Now this does not have a USB for boot like you see with a lot of freeing ass. This actually has a SATA DOM on it. And SATA DOM is, you can look this up, but there's small SATA drives that are designed for being a boot device in coming a lot of enterprise equipment. Now inside they have left you more SATA ports than there are even ports in here. So we have the four bays in the front. And then we have two more bays with trays and cabling for SSDs. So this will allow you without having to go and hunt down another cable and a power connector to add in a pair of SSDs to use for caching drives, more storage, or an L2 arc. Ideally you're going to want to get SSDs if you have a performance need for them for either the L2 arc or the caching drives to increase performance. But then left you an easy way to mount them right in here, which is really nice. Cableing inside the box is very clean, very organized. So there's really nothing in the way, nothing kind of sloppy looking. Like I said, the people at IAC systems care a lot about the machines and putting this together with a nice server motherboard, ECC RAM, and nice cable management makes this box just really a pleasure. Now the box does have one PCIe expansion on here and a slot for it. So if you wanted to, you could add another card in here, provide that card for this box. Maybe it would be a 10 gigabit network card if you didn't want to just bond the two 1 gigabits together because this only has gigabit networking as shipped to us. But other than that, the box is nice and let's talk about the software features. Now one last thing I will comment, being that it's standard, being that it's ZFS means if there was ever something to happen to this or if you wanted to upgrade, you can. And the drives themselves are not proprietary. ZFS actually works on more than just the BSD platform or more than FreeNAS. So that being said, if you needed to move these drives to recover data because something horrific happens to the box itself, that is completely possible. So your data would be able to be recovered on another machine, provided it supports ZFS. And of course, it's running FreeNAS, so you could also back up your config and load it onto another FreeNAS system and import all your volumes as well. So if you later decided to get a bigger system, that would be possible. Alright, so let's look at the software now and kind of dig into this a little bit further. Alright, so the FreeNAS is booted up and ready to log in. Like I said, we've actually already gone through the wizard and set this up. The IP address, how did I get it? Well, there's two ways. You can plug in the VGA that's located on the back or you can look at your DHCP server and see what new address has got hanged out. For those of you that don't want to RTFM that just want to get started, A, B, CD, 1, 2, 3, 4 is the default password. We're still testing it, so we haven't changed any of that. System product name, FreeNAS Mini 2.0, load average of time, serial number, the Intel Atom, and this did ship to us. This is August of 2018 with FreeNAS 11.1 U5. Load it up on that, save it on. We didn't have to load any updates, so apparently they keep these machines up to date. U5 has been out for a little while, but nice that I didn't have to deal with any updates. One less step. Now I've gone through and I'm not going to go in depth on setting this up from scratch. I have my other videos that tell you how to set up and get started with the shares. Let's cover some of the features that make this system a little bit unique and really nice. So we're going to jump over here to networking and we're going to look over here at IPMI. Now bound to the same network interface port, the first interface, it does bind a management IP address so you can get to the IPMI interface. And like I said, this is an ASRAC course. We're going to go admin. Admin, that is the default. Haven't been changed yet. Left things at default so you guys can see this. And we're presented with the offline interface, the dashboard here. So I can look at the motherboard temperatures, CPU temperature, different fan speeds if they're plugged into the different motherboard fans, 12 volt rail, V-core voltages, and if there's any problems with this. So it has a server health sensor readings. I can do an event log, system and audit log, maintenance on here, firmware updates. I thought it was kind of cool. It's got some video recordings if you want to record what the server is doing. Console redirection options, Java console. So here's a Java console where we can actually get right to the interface of FreeNAS. We can perform a power server cycle so we can say power it on, power it off, plug in different devices, set up images. This is a really neat feature. Plus we can even display a keyboard on here which I thought was kind of cool. If you want to be able to force a certain command to it, it does have a software keyboard on it. So you can see when we do these, it does insert the keys. Kind of novel. So you have this direct access. So if the machine is offline or there's something of a problem, the way these IPMI work, even if I power down the machine, I don't lose access to the IPMI. If you're not familiar with it, you can look this up. This allows for essentially an offline management. So it's the same as being plugged right into the keyboard and mouse on the machine. And of course, just being able to do remotely when you're troubleshooting or when this is in a server rack or in a back room without any keyboard or counsel hooked up to it, so you can't see what's going on. This is a just wonderful tool. You can get in and change all the settings on here and even make this full screen. Make it show the cursor if there's mouse. This is a really cool feature. Like I said, I found this really nice that they chose this board with this feature in here. We're going to head and close that. From the real control, we can power off the server immediately, power it off, or at least shut down, power on or just power cycle it. So there's some type of problem. Like I said, this gives you a lot of handy tools, especially if you're going to solve some small business where you want to know what's going on, but you can't see the counsel. They give you easy access to this. Other than that, everything else about it is standard free NAS storage. It was easy enough to set up volume manager. Like I said, nothing real proprietary about this or nothing overly special other than it's free NAS. So if you're familiar with this world, you are completely at home. This box runs the standard version. There's like not really any thing about it that makes it super special other than it pulls out the free NAS product number right here. And it comes with a warranty from IAC systems. But overall, we're really happy with this. It's working great. I haven't had any issues with it. The install, the test, and we actually have created some volumes, deleted some volumes, swapped the drives around it all over our usual testing. None of them revealed any issues with the machine itself. And I believe it's perfectly fine to be running this C2758 core because it's very power efficient. So this system is not pulling a lot of watts idling. It's sitting around the 50 watt mark. It scales upward as needed, but 50 watts to have a NAS server running in your back, not bad. Also, when you go with low wattage, it also means you're not generating a lot of heat. A lot of high wattage systems means a lot of different heat being generated as well. So our review of this is quite positive. We've rebooted it all kinds of times, unplugged it randomly, and did our usual torture testing with it, pop and drives out, and no issues at all. It completely recovered as expected as free NAS does. So we can't really report any issues with it. We'll probably do a follow up on this maybe in a year or two after it's been running out of client. But all the other free NAS systems that we deployed are still working perfectly fine. So if you're interested in this, it's a wonderful little device. If you don't want to have to try to choose which motherboard and which parts to build your free NAS, you're looking for a compact, ready to deploy, free NAS solution with all the wonderful power of ZFS. I actually recommend this box at MSRP's for $9.99 for the free NAS Mini with four drive bays and two SSDs internally for caching. So it's a great choice. It is a simple system. And away you go. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.