N36L hardware and installing FreeNAS to a USB flash drive

The Hardware

The N36L Microserver comes with the following specifications

• Chassis: Desktop
• CPU: 1.3GHz AMD Athlon II Neo N36L
• Memory: 1GB 800MHz UDIMM DDR3 expandable to 8GB
• Storage: 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disk in cold swap carrier
• RAID: embedded AMD SATA RAID controller
• Array support: RAID 0, 1, JBOD
• Expansion: 2 x PCI Express
• Ports: eSATA; 7 x USB2 (6 external, 1 internal);
• Network: Gigabit Ethernet

Unboxed N36L Microserver

There is a custom BIOS update  floating around that allows you change the IDE 5.25 drive bay and eSATA to AHCI. This is recommended as you can then install THIS to take advantage of the empty 5.25 drive bay and install an additional SATA Disk drive. I replaced the 1GB memory with 8GB. I've added 4 2TB green SATA drives and moved the 250GB drive into the 5.25 bay.

The internal USB will be used to boot into FreeNAS installed on a flash drive.

Installing FreeNAS 9.1.1

Download the most recent disk image from HERE (should be a *.xz file) and the tools Win32DiskImager and 7zip and install them. Use 7zip to extract the *.img file from the downloaded *.xz file. Plug your USB flash drive, run Win32DiskImager ans choose the drive letter of your flash drive. Select the Freenas *.img file and click write, wait for the process to finish. You now have Freenas installed on your USB flash drive.

Booting into FreeNAS for the first time

Configure the BIOS of the N36L to make USB the first bootable device, insert your FreeNAS USB flash drive into the internal USB port and turn on the server. All being well after a few minutes you will end up at a menu screen (11 options) and a URL to be able to configure your NAS via a browser. At this point I configure the NAS to have a fixed IP (configured to be DHCP initially).

When you have fixed the IP we can go to a browser to continue to configure FreeNAS

Configuring FreeNAS via the Web GUI - Part 1