FreeNAS on XW4600

I decided to try FreeNas at home, Especially after reading this forum post I think I have the answer to my dilemma of trying to remember to download the latest episodes of [insert new show here].

I have Charter 60mb internet at home, protected by a pfSense firewall, and a separate IBM sff Lenovo desktop hosting my Plex Media server.  Performance is good.. very good, however waiting the ~10 minutes to download and copy over a new episode of some show is horrible.  Well that's a lie sort of.. it's not horrible, in truth its actually quite nice but so is automation ;)

So I've got access to an old HP XW4600 workstation, powered by a Core2Duo E6850 3ghz,4gb ram, and I tossed in 4 x 2TB Western Digital green drives.  Since this box has a USB 2 port inside the case I installed the latest freeNas image onto a 4gb Cruzer thumbdrive and set the boot device to USB.

*FreeNAS loads itself into a ram drive


I know what you are thinking, "Why would you use WD Greens?!?"  Well normally I wouldn't until I read this explanation of the differences between Red and Green WD drives. Using a Win98 boot disk image, and WDIDLE3 I set mine to 300 seconds, whereas default head parking timeout is 8 seconds.
Everyone says increasing that time will allow for much quicker responsiveness and longer lifespan on teh parking mechanism.  We shall see.

I'd much rather be using Reds but I don't have any to test with currently. But Im taking this box home to setup over the weekend with FreeNAS, Plex Media Server, Couch Potato, Transmission and Slick beard.. couple that with some vodka and a litte BF4 in between I think it'll be a good weekend, rain or shine.