4 ms·

You go from 16 terabytes to 14.5 tebibytes right out of the gate. And then if you use Raid-Z2 (Raid 6), which uses 2 disks for parity, on a four disk set, half

You go from 16 terabytes to 14.5 tebibytes right out of the gate. And then if you use Raid-Z2 (Raid 6), which uses 2 disks for parity, on a four disk set, half of your drives will be used for parity. This was of course the right call, because with the size of current drives Raid-Z1 (Raid 5) is really risky. Personally on my ZFS based home built server I use mirroring, due to the well publicized issue with the extreme difficulty of increasing the size of ZFS's VDEVs. Which has the same 50% usable space reduction.

voltagex_ 11y ago
Yep, I've gone to a pair of vdevs too. I'm calming down now, even if I had to format an external drive to ZFS just to get it to mount (yes, yes, I know, USB is terrible and I'm going to lose all my data). I would not recommend FreeNAS for a home user.
- js2 11y ago
  Why not? I've been extremely happy with FreeNAS. I have two mirrored pairs of disks in mine. Besides performing NAS duties with aplomb, I also have a half dozen jails running various HTPC tasks such as hosting Plex.
- benjaminl 11y ago
  You are making me very glad that I went with Ubuntu rather than a NAS oriented OS like FreeNAS.
  - fsckin 11y ago
    My first NAS build used FreeNAS. For a simple Samba box, it's just about perfect. However, I wanted my NAS to run a few more services than the ones that were easily available and pre-built "blessed" plugins. I had a low spec CPU in the NAS and went through hell and back to build/install/jail a few packages from source (along with their dependancies). It was a steep learning curve and wasn't terribly fun. When it came time to add a second NAS, I chose Ubuntu and ZFS on Linux. It's been running like a champ for well over a year without a single hiccup. I don't think I've even built a single package ever. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.

4 ms·

You go from 16 terabytes to 14.5 tebibytes right out of the gate. And then if you use Raid-Z2 (Raid 6), which uses 2 disks for parity, on a four disk set, half

by benjaminl 11y ago

voltagex_ 11y ago
Yep, I've gone to a pair of vdevs too. I'm calming down now, even if I had to format an external drive to ZFS just to get it to mount (yes, yes, I know, USB is terrible and I'm going to lose all my data). I would not recommend FreeNAS for a home user.
- js2 11y ago
  Why not? I've been extremely happy with FreeNAS. I have two mirrored pairs of disks in mine. Besides performing NAS duties with aplomb, I also have a half dozen jails running various HTPC tasks such as hosting Plex.
- benjaminl 11y ago
  You are making me very glad that I went with Ubuntu rather than a NAS oriented OS like FreeNAS.
  - fsckin 11y ago
    My first NAS build used FreeNAS. For a simple Samba box, it's just about perfect. However, I wanted my NAS to run a few more services than the ones that were easily available and pre-built "blessed" plugins. I had a low spec CPU in the NAS and went through hell and back to build/install/jail a few packages from source (along with their dependancies). It was a steep learning curve and wasn't terribly fun. When it came time to add a second NAS, I chose Ubuntu and ZFS on Linux. It's been running like a champ for well over a year without a single hiccup. I don't think I've even built a single package ever. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.