Through the web-gui users of FreeNAS control everything about the server, including the formatting and partitioning of hard-drives, encryption and even restarting the machine. This process can seem less then intuitive in some cases but is manageable once understood. To illustrate this an example software RAID volume is created below, spanning 2 disks.

Firstly FreeNAS needs to be made aware of the disks it has access to, so each disk is added under the ‘Management’ menu, as ’Unformatted’.

After adding all the disks its important to remember changes won’t be affected until ‘Apply changes’ is clicked, something that remains true throughout this process.

Next the disks must be formatted under the ‘Format’, using ‘Software RAID’ as the file system.

Now, under the Software RAID a JBOD volume is created using the previously formatted volumes. JBOD stands for ‘Just a Bunch Of Disks’, it makes many disks look like one that is the sum of their sizes. It is one of the two RAID setups that doesn’t require exactly the same size disks. The other is RAID 5, but that requires 3 disks to be effective.

Now this RAID volume has been created it must be formatted to act as a single disk. It should be formatted using UFS, that is the Unix File System. This is the file system used by BSD, although since this is a non-OS specific file server the underlying file system is unimportant.

This RAID volume must now be mounted before it can be shared. Mounting seems obtuse since it doesn’t make the volume accessible to anything except the sharing. Go to the ‘Mount Point’ menu, the default partition info can be used (thankfully, the partition instructions can be confusing).