16 ms·

FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

275 points by phantom_oracle 10y ago

mawburn 10y ago
I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system. Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?
- usefulcat 10y ago
  I think the short answer is that ZFS doesn't work well unless it has a decent amount of memory available for caching.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  The website isn't loading for me, but if I remember correctly the default FS is ZFS, which likes its memory.
- singlow 10y ago
  I think the memory is for ZFS which needs a lot of memory to perform well.
- andoriyu 10y ago
  Simple. ZFS has memory requirements to operate efficiently. If you have less <8Gb of RAM, which is by the way as small as it gets, then you probably have not a lot of drives, therefore won't benefit from ZFS nor FreeNAS. Kind of like when you don't need a full blown CRM to manage two customers.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  It's just a recommendation. Remember, some people use FreeNAS professionally, so they're going to err on the side of recommending too much (= enterprise). Less will probably work fine, as long as you aren't running dedupe, compression, or heaps of jails and services. E.g. if you have 4 drives and just use the SMB service to connect to one or two machines, 4GiB is probably okay. Having said that, RAM is pretty cheap. 8GiB isn't a huge ask for any machine in 2016. Any system with less than 4GiB, is it really worth bothering with redundancy/ZFS? UFS (which is far less RAM hungry) + nightly backups might be good enough. (Edit: of course, you miss out on the awesome ZFS features with UFS. It's never easy, is it?)
danbee 10y ago
Obligatory post complaining about the weird janky scrolling...
FireBeyond 10y ago
I do love FreeNAS, at home and at the office too (for development purposes - I'd trust it for production but with our client base it's better to be more "corporate"). It has a good cross section of features from 'home' to 'pro', AFP/NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, directory integration, plugins (more aimed at home, with things like news downloaders, BT clients).
- Something1234 10y ago
  What do you use instead of zfs in production?
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    The latest we've bought is a Dell SCv2020 SAN appliance that provides iSCSI to our VMware server.
buro9 10y ago
Ooh, these FreeNAS boxes for the home are very nice: https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?". The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.
- rsync 10y ago
  I think the generation 8 "HP Microserver" is a good system. One limitation is the 16GB max ram, but given that it's for home use with (presumably) large files and a small number of simultaneous clients, it shouldn't be a problem - even if you use 4x 8 TB disks. The key is to populate it with ECC ram which should be an absolute requirement for any ZFS system.
  - olp2 10y ago
    A quick google search brings up [0] telling ECC RAM is just as necessary as it is for another filesystem. [0]: http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-yo...
  - bpye 10y ago
    Just bought one of these for exactly this! Going with 4 3TB disks in raidz2 because it was the best price/TB I could find without taking some external 5TB drives out of their enclosures.
vibrolax 10y ago
FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future. I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago. One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.
- goda90 10y ago
  Modern virtualization stuff like VT-d means you can pass through your hard drive controllers to a FreeNAS VM and have it work just the same as if it were running natively. In fact, you can just keep a backup of your FreeNAS configuration on a flash drive install, so if your Hypervisor or VM fall apart, then you just boot to the flash drive without a hitch.
- zwerdlds 10y ago
  Not to mention, the jails system in FreeNAS has been in flux in the past. It never quite worked well for me, so offloading the "app" stuff to a workhorse is what I did.
  - dokument 10y ago
    I believe they are replacing jails with docker containers.
    - Fzzr 10y ago
      Both docker containers and bhyve VMs.
benologist 10y ago
Another open source option is Synology's Disk Station Manager which includes a bunch of open source software they've skinned and created mobile apps for so you can localize stuff like music streaming, dropbox, notes etc - https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  Not open source.
- nugget 10y ago
  Can you run DSM on non-synology hardware?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ibelimb 10y ago
    Supposedly Xpenology[0] lets you do that. I have not used it personally, as I have actual Synology hardware. [0] http://xpenology.org/ http://xpenology.org/
    - jdhawk 10y ago
      Yes, on x86 systems it mimics a DS3615. I've seen it installed on cheap dell desktops, like an optiplex 755. Works well, with some limitations. I dont think their automatic port forwarding service (quickconnect) works well - since that service checks for a valid Synology MAC address. Additionally - you can't do the automatic system updates as it might break certain portions that XPEnology overrides.
      - bgmccollum 10y ago
        There is a serial number / MAC generator that makes quick connect work just fine.
- 10y ago
c0g 10y ago
I've been using Unraid for a few months. It has a different - arguably inferior - parity strategy but has amazing support for VMs. I've got my gaming machine, my GPU dev box and a bunch of smaller services all in the same box and can do some really sweet online configuration.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  How is it for gaming? I'd imagine it's using a VM solution (Xen HVM or KVM so it can do IOMMU?). I've been avoiding it because I figure that VM solution would get detected by anti-cheat in many games (particularly the nasty kernel level ones like EasyAntiCheat, GameGuard, etc).
  - c0g 10y ago
    I have 8x2.8 ghz Xeon cores 32 GB of RAM and a 970 GTX in my gaming vm. Works perfectly for DOOM, Witcher 3, all at 1920x1080 on high settings (maybe not full but damn pretty). Consensus on the forum seems to be you lose low single digit performance. It's a KVM hypervisor and I haven't played online, why would they ban you for using a VM?
    - ultramancool 10y ago
      A VM makes it possible to arbitrarily read and modify memory from outside of the operating system in a way that the anti-cheat can't otherwise detect (heck, some VMs have full out integrated debuggers), so anti-cheat and DRM schemes used by games may disallow VMs.
- ThatPlayer 10y ago
  I've been thinking about switching my home NAS to UnRAID. The parity sounds great and BTRFS RAID5/6 just doesn't seem to be in a good state right now.
Annatar 10y ago
Once you go ZFS, you will never want to go back. True 'dat!
- mindslight 10y ago
  Once you go unison you will never want to go back. I even run some ZFS without ECC memory, because if hardware goes bad and programmatically corrupts it isn't the end of the world.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    What is "unison"?
    - mindslight 10y ago
      Bidirectional file synchronization. It makes any single replica not that important. Don't concentrate your resources into a single "invincible" box.
      - Annatar 10y ago
        Is the synchronization synchronous or asynchronous? Is there a uniform resource identifier where I could read more about it? Or perhaps some book? Research paper?
        mindslight 10y ago
        https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ It synchronizes directory trees on arbitrary filesystems, so I think the answer to your question would be "asynchronous". Most individuals don't have TBs of working set continually being updated and requiring a central authoritative copy. They have a small working set and a long-term archive they'd just never want to lose. Unison's model isn't perfect (eg having to create a star topology, lack of built-in inotify). But it's been around forever, is written in a sane language, and is rock solid.
tracker1 10y ago
Although I don't think I'd ever DIY another NAS box, I would suggest the following, use a common chipset controller that exposes each drive/device separately with all information, some don't. Also, prefer a system with ECC, Asus supports ECC on most AMD FX supporting motherboards for the less expensive option there. Also, have 2 spare drives on hand. I went back to Synology after my uper-nas crashed and burned (really bad run of 3TB Seagate drives, 9 out of 12 dead in under 3 years)... Now debating between a 4x8TB or 5x6tb in a future nas box.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  Those 3TB Seagate drives are literally the worst in the business. The 2TB and 4TB are pretty good (roughly on par or better than competitors according to the backblaze reports) but those 3TB drives were utter shit for some reason, ~20% year over year failure rates. Some retailers have even started to sell the 3TB Seagate drives at almost the same price as the 2TB ones. Probably the only way to get rid of them.
  - goda90 10y ago
    Well that's reassuring... I just built my home NAS. 3 3TB WD Reds and 3 3TB Seagate NAS drives. Two of the Seagates were DOA so I got them replaced. I ran full hard drive tests on them without problems but now I'm extra paranoid.
    - ultramancool 10y ago
      That's what RAID is for, just make sure you scrub it often enough to catch any potential failure. If you're ever looking for replacements, those 4 TB Seagates are hard to beat without paying enterprise-level prices, despite how much of a turn-off the high failure rate on their 3TB drives may be.
  - CamperBob2 10y ago
    Safe to say the 3 TB drives are 4 TB drives that failed one manufacturing test or another.
  - 10y ago
tombert 10y ago
I ran FreeNAS for a couple years. It's tremendously nice, and what I recommend for nearly anyone who want to have a personal cloud.
allendoerfer 10y ago
Storage is a really weak area of mine, but it is important, and I do not see much technical discussion here anyway, so I am going to expose myself: How does integrity protection work in practice? I know that the bits on the HDD itself do not map one to one to bits you can actually use and that it uses that to protect us from flipped bits. I know that beyond that RAID/RAIDZ is supposed to help. I guess redundancy alone does not help. Two copies would not help to determine which bit is the correct one, you would need three. Once you have these, I guess you would be able to detect corruption. Am I guessing correct that duplication beyond 3 times would just help with read speed and in the case when a drive fails while one is already dead (e.g. when you are rebuilding)? What then? Does RAID/ZFS automatically fix it? I imagine at some point the drive would have to be replaced, do you have to check that manually or does it detect that by itself? I imagine after that you would have to run a rebuild. So I guess my question would be: Could I put a FreeNas in a corner a room and leave it there? Would it just blink when I need to put a new drive in or would it need more maintenance? Of course talking about worst case scenarios here, so say I want this to live for 10 years sitting in the corner.
- codemac 10y ago
  > Two copies would not help to determine which bit is the correct one, you would need three. Once you have these, I guess you would be able to detect corruption. Am I guessing correct that duplication beyond 3 times would just help with read speed and in the case when a drive fails while one is already dead (e.g. when you are rebuilding)? You're confusing two topics. Integrity vs. availability. 3x copies, RAID4 XOR, RAIDZ (a form of RAID6), etc are about increasing the availability of your data in the face of device failure/partitions. The integrity of you data is computed different ways in different systems, but you can safely think of it in your head as a pile of checksums on top of eachother. There is a half decent blog entry[0] on Oracle's website, but you can mentally model it as having checksum on disk for each block, which then is combined with other blocks into some larger object that is also checksummed, and on and on until you have "end-to-end integrity". It is a feature of all serious storage systems. I'd love if someone who was more familiar with ZFS could respond with how ZFS's internals work for you.. I worked at a direct competitor of Sun's that sued eachother over this stuff, so I actively tried to not learn about ZFS. I regret this. [0]: https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data
wilhil 10y ago
I have bad memories of freenas (before the split/new version) many years ago when I had a disk and power failure... hdb went, so, c/d moved up a letter and it automatically screwed up raid... ... I was able to recover, but, I remember how many hours I spent on it. Please tell me it is better now?
- BrainInAJar 10y ago
  it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible. you can lose the system disk (usb key) that holds your settings, but the data you actually care about will be safe.
  - josteink 10y ago
    > it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible Even if it's ZFS it can get quite messed up if you set it up based on sda, sdb, etc like naming conventions. In that case entire zpools can fail to import in case of failure. Therefore the best practice is to use device-by-id, so that if a device like sda falls out, the rest of your array should still resolve correctly. And how the array is created is entirely a FreeNAS thing. Hopefully one which have, like OP says, improved.
    - dragontamer 10y ago
      You're freaking me out. As soon as I get home, I'm going to swap some of my HDD cables and see what happens... I've basically been assuming that NAS4Free uses device-by-id like any sane OS should.
      - fnj 10y ago
        NAS4Free and FreeNAS are just relabeled FreeBSD with GUI stuff pasted on. FreeBSD doesn't have /dev/disk/by_{id,label,partuuid,path,uuid}. It's its biggest failing IMO. Their /dev/diskid is NOT what it sounds like. That said, ZFS pools under FreeBSD and derivatives, just as under linux, are imported from info stored on the drives themselves. They should be able to reboot after scrambling the cables. It would take more nerve, or craziness, than I've got to PROVE that using any pools I care about. However, I have completely screwed a ZFS replace command in FreeBSD following a bad drive in a RAID-Z3 pool. It dutifully replaced a perfectly good drive with my new drive. But no harm was done to the pool. After it finished, I ran another zfs replace, replacing the bad drive with the "mistake" old drive. It all worked! ZFS is so brilliant, be careful or it will put your eyes out :-)
lechevalierd3on 10y ago
Or if you want a linux flavored version: http://www.openmediavault.org http://www.openmediavault.org
- jazzyk 10y ago
  Great, and perhaps slightly under-appreciated software. Works like a charm, simple and reliable.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  I was just about to post this. I run OMV at home, and haven't had any problems with it. I've used both FreeNAS and OMV, and find the OMV community more welcoming and helpful than the FreeNAS one. The FreeNAS community has organized itself with the intent of focusing exclusively on very specific very corporate use case. If you don't fit they're use case, you are bad and should feel bad. OMV on the other hand is much more open and willing to help people use adapt it to their own needs. With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears to be the same, which makes the community distinction every more cogent.
  - snvzz 10y ago
    > With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears to be the same, Huh no. OMV is Linux + PHP.
    - ausjke 10y ago
      That's correct, what is used on freenas for its GUI? never used freenas yet.
      - guroot 10y ago
        I believe it's Django
- xenophonf 10y ago
  Note that OpenMediaVault doesn't feature ZFS, which is a key component of FreeNAS.
dragontamer 10y ago
NAS4Free > FreeNAS. Start your flamewars nerds! -------------- I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid. Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies: * Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in. * FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it. ------- * Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility. Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later. You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term. -------- ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it. I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration. Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone) Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS. -------- * Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box. Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.
minikites 10y ago
I use NAS4Free which is similar, on an HP Microserver N54L (it has ECC RAM) in a RAID-Z1 configuration and a cron job set up to zfs-scrub the drives monthly. If you're going to DIY a NAS, I can heartily recommend both NAS4Free and the HP Microserver.
rsync 10y ago
A FreeNAS device has the ability to do native ZFS send/recv to rsync.net.[1] Always remember to ask about the "HN Readers Discount". [1] http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-...
- lima 10y ago
  Is there any way to use this and encrypt your data?
  - dsr_ 10y ago
    Not until OpenZFS offers encryption, which might be... in a year or so? There are signs that it's coming along well.
  - gradschool 10y ago
    I don't know if it's possible with FreeNAS, but on an ordinary Debian box nothing stops you running ZFS on LUKS encrypted devices. I've been using this configuration without issues for about a year on a home file server.
    - joushou 10y ago
      That won't do anything when it comes to encrypted sends. ZFS supports disk encryption without a hitch. I wouldn't recommend using LUKS, though - leave it to the built-in support.
  - rsync 10y ago
    If you want encryption at rest with an ssh-accessible data store (like rsync.net) then you should use borg[1][2] - the "holy grail" of backup tools. This is unrelated to ZFS send/recv, other than the fact that we are also the only cloud storage platform to offer borg/attic support. [1] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ [2] http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html
jalada 10y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong (please!) but FreeNAS still can't (easily?) do what Synology's 'Hybrid RAID' (basically sharded RAID across drives) facilitates; growing your (redundant, e.g. 1 or more parity drives) volume by adding more drives, and also growing your volume by replacing drives with larger ones. I've always thought that was essential, it bemuses me that there aren't many solutions out there that help you do this. I guess everyone must buy have loads of disposable income to buy 8 drives at once.
- krondor 10y ago
  I'm not sure about FreeNAS, but I do want to point out this is possible in the btrfs filesystem (sharded raid across drives). I'm not aware of any FreeNAS equivalents though utilizing it, but rolling your own is certainly an option.
  - nfriedly 10y ago
    RockStor is a Linux/btrfs equivalent to FreeNAS - I've been running it for a few months and have been pretty happy overall. http://rockstor.com/ http://rockstor.com/
- goda90 10y ago
  You can grow your volume by replacing drives with larger ones. All have to be replaced first though.
- xenophonf 10y ago
  OpenZFS won't let you alter the array geometry, so if you start with an 8-drive RAID-Z2 pool, you're stuck with it. You can expand the capacity of the pool by replacing each drive, changing them one by one and re-synchronizing the array between replacements.
funkaster 10y ago
Interesting... Just last week I started building a much simpler/smaller setup based also on ZFS for personal use: - rpi 3 (running debian testing) - 2x1Tb disks (with usb docking) - zfs (raidz) on the disks - ssh through tor for tunneling purposes I can backup my personal computers and run some extra stuff on the rpi. Yes, it's only USB2, but I don't care. I mostly send incremental snapshots from my computer and it's fast enough. (e.g. zfs send -i yesterday home/user@today | ssh rpi zfs recv home/user) I'm tempted on building a small recv server that can allow partial transfers, but so far it works for me. Also, as soon as encryption is enabled on zfs-linux, I'm turning that on :) Total budget: ~$180 (the most expensive part were obviously the HDDs)
- brink 10y ago
  AFAIK, the Raspberry Pi's put their ethernet on the USB bus. That's a huge downside to using a Raspberry Pi as a NAS solution.
  - funkaster 10y ago
    that's true. But as I said before, I'm not after speed or actually using this a NAS, more like a backup server (where I can ~send~ my zfs snapshots).
eric_the_read 10y ago
One thing that's been unclear to me with ZFS: How should I design a ZFS-based storage system for extensibility? From what I've read, it seems like you can't add devices to a pool once it's been created. I'd love to create a small-ish NAS right now to store, say, the top 10% of my blu-ray collection, and then incrementally upgrade it over time as I get funds.
- snvzz 10y ago
  You can add vdev to pool anytime. Removing them is not as easy, so some planning is necessary.
  - eric_the_read 10y ago
    For others, I found this, explaining the process: http://alp-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-pool.html http://alp-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-p... Downside is, you lose a significant chunk of storage (the author measured > 20%), but you can add new storage to a pool online.
- wtallis 10y ago
  You can expand a pool one RAID array at a time, but growing one drive at a time isn't really possible except by not using RAID; ZFS doesn't have a true equivalent to the BTRFS rebalance operation.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  https://jsosic.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/expanding-zfs-zpool-raid/ https://jsosic.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/expanding-zfs-zpool-...
  - eric_the_read 10y ago
    Yeah, I saw that before, but that isn't quite what I wanted, if I'm reading it right. That tells me how to replace all the drives in my array with new ones; I'd prefer to (for instance) start with 4x 4TB drives, and add new ones as my storage needs build up.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I've heard rumors about ZFS being really slow on mounts of very large filesystems. I've also heard that it is a black hole from which CPU time and RAM enter, and do not emerge. Is this true, and if so, to what degree?
cies 10y ago
When looking for a professional storage solution, I found FreeNAS, but then noticed that I was looking for something more distributed and robust. I found Ceph. Also 100% opensource. But needs like 3 physical machines in production (at least) in order to have some kind of built-in redundancy.
zzzcpan 10y ago
I think NASes should become the things of the past. They are too fragile, too maintenance-greedy and don't scale enough for the modern world. I'd much rather see a tiny distro with ready to use Swift, Gluster, Ceph, whatever, but not ZFS (sorry ZFS fans).
- takeda 10y ago
  So let me get this straight: running a cluster of swift/gluster/ceph is less maintenance greedy than a single box?
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    Than a single traditional NAS box, yes. EDIT: Let me explain a bit more: once you start running a distributed system you stop caring about OS, filesystem and disk level issues, because you have redundancy on another level. And it makes all the difference. You don't worry anymore, you can always just reboot, hard-reset or take a node out to investigate. Suddenly you realize that it's not a big deal even if some node starts freezing or some process starts OOMing and crashing, you don't care, you just let them.
    - barrystaes 10y ago
      If dont want to care for the OS, who do you expect to keep it in check? Someone has to worry about it: you can try and abstract it away and minimize it but its never gone. I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case. You'd come close by buying QNAP or Synology hardware, they provide software updates (including OS). Even buying software solutions like Unraid. I dont know how maintainable FreeNAS is for someone who doesnt want to worry about OS tho..
      - zzzcpan 10y ago
        > I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case. They don't really look after themselves, but do handle failures on the highest possible level. Which makes it unnecessary to keep each OS in check. What's critical for a single NAS box is critical for a distributed storage only if all boxes of some replica have the same problem at the exact same time, otherwise you just reboot and move on and it doesn't matter if it happens again, it doesn't cause any downtime. I actually speak from my own experience. I run and maintain a distributed key-value storage for many years. Although I designed and implemented it myself (and redesigned a bunch of times), I don't see how experience with those other distributed storages, like Swift, would be any different.
acd 10y ago
ZFS runs with even better performance when you turn compression on. zfs set compression=lz4
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I noticed a massive write performance hit when I enabled this. Note that it'll only compress data after you enable it, it isn't retroactive
  - pixl97 10y ago
    What CPUs do you have in your box? In most modern systems the rate at which the CPU can compress data is many, many times faster than the disk can write data. In general compression greatly increases write speeds because less disk IO is needed. The vast majority of benchmarks show that to be the case too. TL:DR, if you notice a performance decrease after enabling compression, something is wrong with your NAS/SAN. That said, if you are just storing large encrypted files on your ZFS then compression isn't needed.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Thought that might be the case - it's an Atom C2758 on a SuperMicro board.
  - acd 10y ago
    CPU is most likely the bottle neck. So my comment should have read if you have a fast cpu you may benefit from ZFS compression. On modern CPU LZ4 should enable about 400MB/s current PCU write compression https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4 https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Thank you for that - it was interesting at least, even if I've probably done it all wrong (TLDR - compression on ZFS definitely varies with the data you try to compress) https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking-compression-on-freebsd/ https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking-compressio... Fun fact: while researching this I found yet another article that contradicts the information I had when I built my zpool, and apparently I've done it all wrong (again).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jmporcel 10y ago
It is worth noticing the Active Directory integration is not yet ready. https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966 https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966
- feld 10y ago
  Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is only indicating that they aren't exposing any query filters in the GUI and searching for all objects from the root is overwhelming the GUI if you have a large AD environment. Rookie mistake, but a simple patch solves it.
Bedon292 10y ago
I have been using FreeNAS for a few years now. It has been great for me, both as a backup and a Plex server. I am really excited for 10.0 when it will have docker support instead of the current jails. It will be much better for some random tinkering too.
jrcii 10y ago
Warning: there is a well documented bug with the FreeNAS boot loader's interaction with Dell PowerEdge servers. Be prepared to spend hours getting it to install if that's your hardware.
grizzles 10y ago
It's funny that we've come so far in computing and yet reliable data storage is still such an unsolved problem for 99.9% of the world's consumers. All the major solutions have their drawbacks. For example, btrfs' present day raid code is in such bad shape that apparently it needs a total rewrite. zfs' volumes can't grow without a resliver, which is not something a home user should ever have to do. From a design perspective, the internals of both btrfs and zfs are only accessible to experts and totally opaque to their users. I've long thought someone could come along and write a FUSE-based distributed storage layer that sat on top of existing file system abstractions like ext4, etc. And that a system built that way could just crush both of those solutions in almost every conceivable way. I've toyed with writing it myself. This approach might not be the fastest, but it would be the most flexible, possibly very reliable, and as a bonus it would be really easy for average users to grok and maximize their data recovery from all but the most catastrophic events.
- vacri 10y ago
  "Reliable data storage" is easy. Engrave the data into a metal plate, or chisel it into rocks. It's when you start adding things like "huge amounts of data" and "readable by computer" and "able to stream in real-time" and "interoperate with multiple devices" and "fits in your hand" and and and... Hyperbole, yes, but the point is that the devil is in the details, and there's a hell of a lot of caveats to the term "reliable data storage". For example, in the modern era, if someone had a way to make ye olde floppy disks 100% reliable for 10 decades, they still wouldn't be used by that 99.9%, simply due to the low data capacity.
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
This is probably a really stupid question, but for what kinds of applications or scenarios are people using FreeNAS? I'm interested in hearing about regular users, not business or enterprises. Upon seeing FreeNAS Mini, I have to say that I'm really interested. I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of keeping all of my data "in the cloud". Being able to keep a local version of all my media would help give me peace of mind. Is maintaining your own "personal cloud", if you will, a reasonable use-case for this? What are the proper expectations from a maintenance perspective? i.e. How often should I expect things to break or require tuning / fixing?
- zippergz 10y ago
  I use FreeBSD+ZFS rather than FreeNAS, but it's the same idea. I store all of my photos and videos, all of my music, and all of my movies. The music and movies are served via Plex and Sonos to various parts of the house, and I use Lightroom to browse the photos. This is not the only copy of any of this stuff, though. The photos get synced to S3 and backed up on a second local hard drive. All of the movies I have are rips of DVDs and Blu-Rays I still own, and can use if needed. And my music is all in Apple Music/iTunes Match (and on my computer, backed up via both Time Machine and Crashplan). So, I'm using the server really as convenient local storage for stuff, not as an alternative to the cloud.
  - js2 10y ago
    How are you accessing the photos? NFS? SMB? Is the performance decent?
riprowan 10y ago
These offerings work well as a pure NAS - your data is backed up and available. Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away. The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.
rwmj 10y ago
Has anyone managed to unlock the Synology bootloader? Their hardware is great (but expensive), but the software leaves a lot to be desired.
akerro 10y ago
Time to donate to FreeBSD https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ !
gerjomarty 10y ago
I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB. Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one would rather use the 4 bays for drives in the zpool, I used the recommended method of running the OS from a USB drive. Sounded strange to me, but it's worked a treat. I saw that there are kits out there for replacing the empty CD slot in the Microserver with an SSD for the same purpose, but I'd rather not touch something that's working now. I went for RAIDZ1, despite a lot of internet protestations about it, as I basically only store movies/music/Time Machine backup there anyway. Been thinking about backup solutions for everything, but it all seems fairly expensive for what is essentially just backing up media. To people recommending Plex for media streaming, I would actually recommend Serviio over it. It took a little extra setup in a jail, requiring some extra port downloads, but it works extremely well in it's DLNA streaming to my PS3. Where it shone brighter than Plex for me was it's support for transcoding and subtitles - it transcodes and shows all of my H264 video files with ASS subtitles with all of the style intact. It also supported PGS subtitles, but my piddling processor didn't quite match up to it.
- kiallmacinnes 10y ago
  Off topic and a total tangent, but... Oh well! Plex has done transcoding, including subtitle burn in, for a LONG time. It's a modified (I think) ffmpeg they ship with the server.
baruch 10y ago
May as well ignore the "RAID is dead" screams. They are only FUD. Do make sure to run the scrub periodically though, that's the real defense against rebuild failures.
ksec 10y ago
Are there any Consumer NAS using FreeNAS?

275 points by phantom_oracle 10y ago

I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system. Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?

usefulcat 10y ago
I think the short answer is that ZFS doesn't work well unless it has a decent amount of memory available for caching.
peatmoss 10y ago
The website isn't loading for me, but if I remember correctly the default FS is ZFS, which likes its memory.
singlow 10y ago
I think the memory is for ZFS which needs a lot of memory to perform well.
andoriyu 10y ago
Simple. ZFS has memory requirements to operate efficiently. If you have less <8Gb of RAM, which is by the way as small as it gets, then you probably have not a lot of drives, therefore won't benefit from ZFS nor FreeNAS. Kind of like when you don't need a full blown CRM to manage two customers.
guitarbill 10y ago
It's just a recommendation. Remember, some people use FreeNAS professionally, so they're going to err on the side of recommending too much (= enterprise). Less will probably work fine, as long as you aren't running dedupe, compression, or heaps of jails and services. E.g. if you have 4 drives and just use the SMB service to connect to one or two machines, 4GiB is probably okay. Having said that, RAM is pretty cheap. 8GiB isn't a huge ask for any machine in 2016. Any system with less than 4GiB, is it really worth bothering with redundancy/ZFS? UFS (which is far less RAM hungry) + nightly backups might be good enough. (Edit: of course, you miss out on the awesome ZFS features with UFS. It's never easy, is it?)

danbee 10y ago

Obligatory post complaining about the weird janky scrolling...

FireBeyond 10y ago

I do love FreeNAS, at home and at the office too (for development purposes - I'd trust it for production but with our client base it's better to be more "corporate"). It has a good cross section of features from 'home' to 'pro', AFP/NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, directory integration, plugins (more aimed at home, with things like news downloaders, BT clients).

Something1234 10y ago
What do you use instead of zfs in production?
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  The latest we've bought is a Dell SCv2020 SAN appliance that provides iSCSI to our VMware server.

buro9 10y ago

Ooh, these FreeNAS boxes for the home are very nice: https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?". The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.

rsync 10y ago
I think the generation 8 "HP Microserver" is a good system. One limitation is the 16GB max ram, but given that it's for home use with (presumably) large files and a small number of simultaneous clients, it shouldn't be a problem - even if you use 4x 8 TB disks. The key is to populate it with ECC ram which should be an absolute requirement for any ZFS system.
- olp2 10y ago
  A quick google search brings up [0] telling ECC RAM is just as necessary as it is for another filesystem. [0]: http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-yo...
- bpye 10y ago
  Just bought one of these for exactly this! Going with 4 3TB disks in raidz2 because it was the best price/TB I could find without taking some external 5TB drives out of their enclosures.

vibrolax 10y ago

FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future. I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago. One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.

goda90 10y ago
Modern virtualization stuff like VT-d means you can pass through your hard drive controllers to a FreeNAS VM and have it work just the same as if it were running natively. In fact, you can just keep a backup of your FreeNAS configuration on a flash drive install, so if your Hypervisor or VM fall apart, then you just boot to the flash drive without a hitch.
zwerdlds 10y ago
Not to mention, the jails system in FreeNAS has been in flux in the past. It never quite worked well for me, so offloading the "app" stuff to a workhorse is what I did.
- dokument 10y ago
  I believe they are replacing jails with docker containers.
  - Fzzr 10y ago
    Both docker containers and bhyve VMs.

benologist 10y ago

Another open source option is Synology's Disk Station Manager which includes a bunch of open source software they've skinned and created mobile apps for so you can localize stuff like music streaming, dropbox, notes etc - https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo

justinsaccount 10y ago
Not open source.
nugget 10y ago
Can you run DSM on non-synology hardware?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ibelimb 10y ago
  Supposedly Xpenology[0] lets you do that. I have not used it personally, as I have actual Synology hardware. [0] http://xpenology.org/ http://xpenology.org/
  - jdhawk 10y ago
    Yes, on x86 systems it mimics a DS3615. I've seen it installed on cheap dell desktops, like an optiplex 755. Works well, with some limitations. I dont think their automatic port forwarding service (quickconnect) works well - since that service checks for a valid Synology MAC address. Additionally - you can't do the automatic system updates as it might break certain portions that XPEnology overrides.
    - bgmccollum 10y ago
      There is a serial number / MAC generator that makes quick connect work just fine.
10y ago

c0g 10y ago

I've been using Unraid for a few months. It has a different - arguably inferior - parity strategy but has amazing support for VMs. I've got my gaming machine, my GPU dev box and a bunch of smaller services all in the same box and can do some really sweet online configuration.

ultramancool 10y ago
How is it for gaming? I'd imagine it's using a VM solution (Xen HVM or KVM so it can do IOMMU?). I've been avoiding it because I figure that VM solution would get detected by anti-cheat in many games (particularly the nasty kernel level ones like EasyAntiCheat, GameGuard, etc).
- c0g 10y ago
  I have 8x2.8 ghz Xeon cores 32 GB of RAM and a 970 GTX in my gaming vm. Works perfectly for DOOM, Witcher 3, all at 1920x1080 on high settings (maybe not full but damn pretty). Consensus on the forum seems to be you lose low single digit performance. It's a KVM hypervisor and I haven't played online, why would they ban you for using a VM?
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    A VM makes it possible to arbitrarily read and modify memory from outside of the operating system in a way that the anti-cheat can't otherwise detect (heck, some VMs have full out integrated debuggers), so anti-cheat and DRM schemes used by games may disallow VMs.
ThatPlayer 10y ago
I've been thinking about switching my home NAS to UnRAID. The parity sounds great and BTRFS RAID5/6 just doesn't seem to be in a good state right now.

Annatar 10y ago

Once you go ZFS, you will never want to go back. True 'dat!

mindslight 10y ago
Once you go unison you will never want to go back. I even run some ZFS without ECC memory, because if hardware goes bad and programmatically corrupts it isn't the end of the world.
- Annatar 10y ago
  What is "unison"?
  - mindslight 10y ago
    Bidirectional file synchronization. It makes any single replica not that important. Don't concentrate your resources into a single "invincible" box.
    - Annatar 10y ago
      Is the synchronization synchronous or asynchronous? Is there a uniform resource identifier where I could read more about it? Or perhaps some book? Research paper?
      - mindslight 10y ago
        https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ It synchronizes directory trees on arbitrary filesystems, so I think the answer to your question would be "asynchronous". Most individuals don't have TBs of working set continually being updated and requiring a central authoritative copy. They have a small working set and a long-term archive they'd just never want to lose. Unison's model isn't perfect (eg having to create a star topology, lack of built-in inotify). But it's been around forever, is written in a sane language, and is rock solid.

tracker1 10y ago

Although I don't think I'd ever DIY another NAS box, I would suggest the following, use a common chipset controller that exposes each drive/device separately with all information, some don't. Also, prefer a system with ECC, Asus supports ECC on most AMD FX supporting motherboards for the less expensive option there. Also, have 2 spare drives on hand. I went back to Synology after my uper-nas crashed and burned (really bad run of 3TB Seagate drives, 9 out of 12 dead in under 3 years)... Now debating between a 4x8TB or 5x6tb in a future nas box.

ultramancool 10y ago
Those 3TB Seagate drives are literally the worst in the business. The 2TB and 4TB are pretty good (roughly on par or better than competitors according to the backblaze reports) but those 3TB drives were utter shit for some reason, ~20% year over year failure rates. Some retailers have even started to sell the 3TB Seagate drives at almost the same price as the 2TB ones. Probably the only way to get rid of them.
- goda90 10y ago
  Well that's reassuring... I just built my home NAS. 3 3TB WD Reds and 3 3TB Seagate NAS drives. Two of the Seagates were DOA so I got them replaced. I ran full hard drive tests on them without problems but now I'm extra paranoid.
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    That's what RAID is for, just make sure you scrub it often enough to catch any potential failure. If you're ever looking for replacements, those 4 TB Seagates are hard to beat without paying enterprise-level prices, despite how much of a turn-off the high failure rate on their 3TB drives may be.
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  Safe to say the 3 TB drives are 4 TB drives that failed one manufacturing test or another.
- 10y ago

tombert 10y ago

I ran FreeNAS for a couple years. It's tremendously nice, and what I recommend for nearly anyone who want to have a personal cloud.

allendoerfer 10y ago

Storage is a really weak area of mine, but it is important, and I do not see much technical discussion here anyway, so I am going to expose myself: How does integrity protection work in practice? I know that the bits on the HDD itself do not map one to one to bits you can actually use and that it uses that to protect us from flipped bits. I know that beyond that RAID/RAIDZ is supposed to help. I guess redundancy alone does not help. Two copies would not help to determine which bit is the correct one, you would need three. Once you have these, I guess you would be able to detect corruption. Am I guessing correct that duplication beyond 3 times would just help with read speed and in the case when a drive fails while one is already dead (e.g. when you are rebuilding)? What then? Does RAID/ZFS automatically fix it? I imagine at some point the drive would have to be replaced, do you have to check that manually or does it detect that by itself? I imagine after that you would have to run a rebuild. So I guess my question would be: Could I put a FreeNas in a corner a room and leave it there? Would it just blink when I need to put a new drive in or would it need more maintenance? Of course talking about worst case scenarios here, so say I want this to live for 10 years sitting in the corner.

codemac 10y ago
> Two copies would not help to determine which bit is the correct one, you would need three. Once you have these, I guess you would be able to detect corruption. Am I guessing correct that duplication beyond 3 times would just help with read speed and in the case when a drive fails while one is already dead (e.g. when you are rebuilding)? You're confusing two topics. Integrity vs. availability. 3x copies, RAID4 XOR, RAIDZ (a form of RAID6), etc are about increasing the availability of your data in the face of device failure/partitions. The integrity of you data is computed different ways in different systems, but you can safely think of it in your head as a pile of checksums on top of eachother. There is a half decent blog entry[0] on Oracle's website, but you can mentally model it as having checksum on disk for each block, which then is combined with other blocks into some larger object that is also checksummed, and on and on until you have "end-to-end integrity". It is a feature of all serious storage systems. I'd love if someone who was more familiar with ZFS could respond with how ZFS's internals work for you.. I worked at a direct competitor of Sun's that sued eachother over this stuff, so I actively tried to not learn about ZFS. I regret this. [0]: https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data

wilhil 10y ago

I have bad memories of freenas (before the split/new version) many years ago when I had a disk and power failure... hdb went, so, c/d moved up a letter and it automatically screwed up raid... ... I was able to recover, but, I remember how many hours I spent on it. Please tell me it is better now?

BrainInAJar 10y ago
it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible. you can lose the system disk (usb key) that holds your settings, but the data you actually care about will be safe.
- josteink 10y ago
  > it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible Even if it's ZFS it can get quite messed up if you set it up based on sda, sdb, etc like naming conventions. In that case entire zpools can fail to import in case of failure. Therefore the best practice is to use device-by-id, so that if a device like sda falls out, the rest of your array should still resolve correctly. And how the array is created is entirely a FreeNAS thing. Hopefully one which have, like OP says, improved.
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    You're freaking me out. As soon as I get home, I'm going to swap some of my HDD cables and see what happens... I've basically been assuming that NAS4Free uses device-by-id like any sane OS should.
    - fnj 10y ago
      NAS4Free and FreeNAS are just relabeled FreeBSD with GUI stuff pasted on. FreeBSD doesn't have /dev/disk/by_{id,label,partuuid,path,uuid}. It's its biggest failing IMO. Their /dev/diskid is NOT what it sounds like. That said, ZFS pools under FreeBSD and derivatives, just as under linux, are imported from info stored on the drives themselves. They should be able to reboot after scrambling the cables. It would take more nerve, or craziness, than I've got to PROVE that using any pools I care about. However, I have completely screwed a ZFS replace command in FreeBSD following a bad drive in a RAID-Z3 pool. It dutifully replaced a perfectly good drive with my new drive. But no harm was done to the pool. After it finished, I ran another zfs replace, replacing the bad drive with the "mistake" old drive. It all worked! ZFS is so brilliant, be careful or it will put your eyes out :-)

lechevalierd3on 10y ago

Or if you want a linux flavored version: http://www.openmediavault.org http://www.openmediavault.org

jazzyk 10y ago
Great, and perhaps slightly under-appreciated software. Works like a charm, simple and reliable.
jonathankoren 10y ago
I was just about to post this. I run OMV at home, and haven't had any problems with it. I've used both FreeNAS and OMV, and find the OMV community more welcoming and helpful than the FreeNAS one. The FreeNAS community has organized itself with the intent of focusing exclusively on very specific very corporate use case. If you don't fit they're use case, you are bad and should feel bad. OMV on the other hand is much more open and willing to help people use adapt it to their own needs. With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears to be the same, which makes the community distinction every more cogent.
- snvzz 10y ago
  > With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears to be the same, Huh no. OMV is Linux + PHP.
  - ausjke 10y ago
    That's correct, what is used on freenas for its GUI? never used freenas yet.
    - guroot 10y ago
      I believe it's Django
xenophonf 10y ago
Note that OpenMediaVault doesn't feature ZFS, which is a key component of FreeNAS.

dragontamer 10y ago

NAS4Free > FreeNAS. Start your flamewars nerds! -------------- I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid. Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies: * Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in. * FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it. ------- * Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility. Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later. You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term. -------- ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it. I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration. Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone) Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS. -------- * Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box. Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.

minikites 10y ago

I use NAS4Free which is similar, on an HP Microserver N54L (it has ECC RAM) in a RAID-Z1 configuration and a cron job set up to zfs-scrub the drives monthly. If you're going to DIY a NAS, I can heartily recommend both NAS4Free and the HP Microserver.

rsync 10y ago

A FreeNAS device has the ability to do native ZFS send/recv to rsync.net.[1] Always remember to ask about the "HN Readers Discount". [1] http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-...

lima 10y ago
Is there any way to use this and encrypt your data?
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Not until OpenZFS offers encryption, which might be... in a year or so? There are signs that it's coming along well.
- gradschool 10y ago
  I don't know if it's possible with FreeNAS, but on an ordinary Debian box nothing stops you running ZFS on LUKS encrypted devices. I've been using this configuration without issues for about a year on a home file server.
  - joushou 10y ago
    That won't do anything when it comes to encrypted sends. ZFS supports disk encryption without a hitch. I wouldn't recommend using LUKS, though - leave it to the built-in support.
- rsync 10y ago
  If you want encryption at rest with an ssh-accessible data store (like rsync.net) then you should use borg[1][2] - the "holy grail" of backup tools. This is unrelated to ZFS send/recv, other than the fact that we are also the only cloud storage platform to offer borg/attic support. [1] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ [2] http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

jalada 10y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong (please!) but FreeNAS still can't (easily?) do what Synology's 'Hybrid RAID' (basically sharded RAID across drives) facilitates; growing your (redundant, e.g. 1 or more parity drives) volume by adding more drives, and also growing your volume by replacing drives with larger ones. I've always thought that was essential, it bemuses me that there aren't many solutions out there that help you do this. I guess everyone must buy have loads of disposable income to buy 8 drives at once.

krondor 10y ago
I'm not sure about FreeNAS, but I do want to point out this is possible in the btrfs filesystem (sharded raid across drives). I'm not aware of any FreeNAS equivalents though utilizing it, but rolling your own is certainly an option.
- nfriedly 10y ago
  RockStor is a Linux/btrfs equivalent to FreeNAS - I've been running it for a few months and have been pretty happy overall. http://rockstor.com/ http://rockstor.com/
goda90 10y ago
You can grow your volume by replacing drives with larger ones. All have to be replaced first though.
xenophonf 10y ago
OpenZFS won't let you alter the array geometry, so if you start with an 8-drive RAID-Z2 pool, you're stuck with it. You can expand the capacity of the pool by replacing each drive, changing them one by one and re-synchronizing the array between replacements.

funkaster 10y ago

Interesting... Just last week I started building a much simpler/smaller setup based also on ZFS for personal use: - rpi 3 (running debian testing) - 2x1Tb disks (with usb docking) - zfs (raidz) on the disks - ssh through tor for tunneling purposes I can backup my personal computers and run some extra stuff on the rpi. Yes, it's only USB2, but I don't care. I mostly send incremental snapshots from my computer and it's fast enough. (e.g. zfs send -i yesterday home/user@today | ssh rpi zfs recv home/user) I'm tempted on building a small recv server that can allow partial transfers, but so far it works for me. Also, as soon as encryption is enabled on zfs-linux, I'm turning that on :) Total budget: ~$180 (the most expensive part were obviously the HDDs)

brink 10y ago
AFAIK, the Raspberry Pi's put their ethernet on the USB bus. That's a huge downside to using a Raspberry Pi as a NAS solution.
- funkaster 10y ago
  that's true. But as I said before, I'm not after speed or actually using this a NAS, more like a backup server (where I can ~send~ my zfs snapshots).

eric_the_read 10y ago

One thing that's been unclear to me with ZFS: How should I design a ZFS-based storage system for extensibility? From what I've read, it seems like you can't add devices to a pool once it's been created. I'd love to create a small-ish NAS right now to store, say, the top 10% of my blu-ray collection, and then incrementally upgrade it over time as I get funds.

snvzz 10y ago
You can add vdev to pool anytime. Removing them is not as easy, so some planning is necessary.
- eric_the_read 10y ago
  For others, I found this, explaining the process: http://alp-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-pool.html http://alp-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-p... Downside is, you lose a significant chunk of storage (the author measured > 20%), but you can add new storage to a pool online.
wtallis 10y ago
You can expand a pool one RAID array at a time, but growing one drive at a time isn't really possible except by not using RAID; ZFS doesn't have a true equivalent to the BTRFS rebalance operation.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
https://jsosic.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/expanding-zfs-zpool-raid/ https://jsosic.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/expanding-zfs-zpool-...
- eric_the_read 10y ago
  Yeah, I saw that before, but that isn't quite what I wanted, if I'm reading it right. That tells me how to replace all the drives in my array with new ones; I'd prefer to (for instance) start with 4x 4TB drives, and add new ones as my storage needs build up.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I've heard rumors about ZFS being really slow on mounts of very large filesystems. I've also heard that it is a black hole from which CPU time and RAM enter, and do not emerge. Is this true, and if so, to what degree?

cies 10y ago

When looking for a professional storage solution, I found FreeNAS, but then noticed that I was looking for something more distributed and robust. I found Ceph. Also 100% opensource. But needs like 3 physical machines in production (at least) in order to have some kind of built-in redundancy.

zzzcpan 10y ago

I think NASes should become the things of the past. They are too fragile, too maintenance-greedy and don't scale enough for the modern world. I'd much rather see a tiny distro with ready to use Swift, Gluster, Ceph, whatever, but not ZFS (sorry ZFS fans).

takeda 10y ago
So let me get this straight: running a cluster of swift/gluster/ceph is less maintenance greedy than a single box?
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Than a single traditional NAS box, yes. EDIT: Let me explain a bit more: once you start running a distributed system you stop caring about OS, filesystem and disk level issues, because you have redundancy on another level. And it makes all the difference. You don't worry anymore, you can always just reboot, hard-reset or take a node out to investigate. Suddenly you realize that it's not a big deal even if some node starts freezing or some process starts OOMing and crashing, you don't care, you just let them.
  - barrystaes 10y ago
    If dont want to care for the OS, who do you expect to keep it in check? Someone has to worry about it: you can try and abstract it away and minimize it but its never gone. I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case. You'd come close by buying QNAP or Synology hardware, they provide software updates (including OS). Even buying software solutions like Unraid. I dont know how maintainable FreeNAS is for someone who doesnt want to worry about OS tho..
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      > I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case. They don't really look after themselves, but do handle failures on the highest possible level. Which makes it unnecessary to keep each OS in check. What's critical for a single NAS box is critical for a distributed storage only if all boxes of some replica have the same problem at the exact same time, otherwise you just reboot and move on and it doesn't matter if it happens again, it doesn't cause any downtime. I actually speak from my own experience. I run and maintain a distributed key-value storage for many years. Although I designed and implemented it myself (and redesigned a bunch of times), I don't see how experience with those other distributed storages, like Swift, would be any different.

acd 10y ago

ZFS runs with even better performance when you turn compression on. zfs set compression=lz4

voltagex_ 10y ago
I noticed a massive write performance hit when I enabled this. Note that it'll only compress data after you enable it, it isn't retroactive
- pixl97 10y ago
  What CPUs do you have in your box? In most modern systems the rate at which the CPU can compress data is many, many times faster than the disk can write data. In general compression greatly increases write speeds because less disk IO is needed. The vast majority of benchmarks show that to be the case too. TL:DR, if you notice a performance decrease after enabling compression, something is wrong with your NAS/SAN. That said, if you are just storing large encrypted files on your ZFS then compression isn't needed.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Thought that might be the case - it's an Atom C2758 on a SuperMicro board.
- acd 10y ago
  CPU is most likely the bottle neck. So my comment should have read if you have a fast cpu you may benefit from ZFS compression. On modern CPU LZ4 should enable about 400MB/s current PCU write compression https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4 https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Thank you for that - it was interesting at least, even if I've probably done it all wrong (TLDR - compression on ZFS definitely varies with the data you try to compress) https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking-compression-on-freebsd/ https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking-compressio... Fun fact: while researching this I found yet another article that contradicts the information I had when I built my zpool, and apparently I've done it all wrong (again).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jmporcel 10y ago

It is worth noticing the Active Directory integration is not yet ready. https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966 https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966

feld 10y ago
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is only indicating that they aren't exposing any query filters in the GUI and searching for all objects from the root is overwhelming the GUI if you have a large AD environment. Rookie mistake, but a simple patch solves it.

Bedon292 10y ago

I have been using FreeNAS for a few years now. It has been great for me, both as a backup and a Plex server. I am really excited for 10.0 when it will have docker support instead of the current jails. It will be much better for some random tinkering too.

jrcii 10y ago

Warning: there is a well documented bug with the FreeNAS boot loader's interaction with Dell PowerEdge servers. Be prepared to spend hours getting it to install if that's your hardware.

grizzles 10y ago

It's funny that we've come so far in computing and yet reliable data storage is still such an unsolved problem for 99.9% of the world's consumers. All the major solutions have their drawbacks. For example, btrfs' present day raid code is in such bad shape that apparently it needs a total rewrite. zfs' volumes can't grow without a resliver, which is not something a home user should ever have to do. From a design perspective, the internals of both btrfs and zfs are only accessible to experts and totally opaque to their users. I've long thought someone could come along and write a FUSE-based distributed storage layer that sat on top of existing file system abstractions like ext4, etc. And that a system built that way could just crush both of those solutions in almost every conceivable way. I've toyed with writing it myself. This approach might not be the fastest, but it would be the most flexible, possibly very reliable, and as a bonus it would be really easy for average users to grok and maximize their data recovery from all but the most catastrophic events.

vacri 10y ago
"Reliable data storage" is easy. Engrave the data into a metal plate, or chisel it into rocks. It's when you start adding things like "huge amounts of data" and "readable by computer" and "able to stream in real-time" and "interoperate with multiple devices" and "fits in your hand" and and and... Hyperbole, yes, but the point is that the devil is in the details, and there's a hell of a lot of caveats to the term "reliable data storage". For example, in the modern era, if someone had a way to make ye olde floppy disks 100% reliable for 10 decades, they still wouldn't be used by that 99.9%, simply due to the low data capacity.

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago

This is probably a really stupid question, but for what kinds of applications or scenarios are people using FreeNAS? I'm interested in hearing about regular users, not business or enterprises. Upon seeing FreeNAS Mini, I have to say that I'm really interested. I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of keeping all of my data "in the cloud". Being able to keep a local version of all my media would help give me peace of mind. Is maintaining your own "personal cloud", if you will, a reasonable use-case for this? What are the proper expectations from a maintenance perspective? i.e. How often should I expect things to break or require tuning / fixing?

zippergz 10y ago
I use FreeBSD+ZFS rather than FreeNAS, but it's the same idea. I store all of my photos and videos, all of my music, and all of my movies. The music and movies are served via Plex and Sonos to various parts of the house, and I use Lightroom to browse the photos. This is not the only copy of any of this stuff, though. The photos get synced to S3 and backed up on a second local hard drive. All of the movies I have are rips of DVDs and Blu-Rays I still own, and can use if needed. And my music is all in Apple Music/iTunes Match (and on my computer, backed up via both Time Machine and Crashplan). So, I'm using the server really as convenient local storage for stuff, not as an alternative to the cloud.
- js2 10y ago
  How are you accessing the photos? NFS? SMB? Is the performance decent?

riprowan 10y ago

These offerings work well as a pure NAS - your data is backed up and available. Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away. The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.

rwmj 10y ago

Has anyone managed to unlock the Synology bootloader? Their hardware is great (but expensive), but the software leaves a lot to be desired.

akerro 10y ago

Time to donate to FreeBSD https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ !

gerjomarty 10y ago

I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB. Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one would rather use the 4 bays for drives in the zpool, I used the recommended method of running the OS from a USB drive. Sounded strange to me, but it's worked a treat. I saw that there are kits out there for replacing the empty CD slot in the Microserver with an SSD for the same purpose, but I'd rather not touch something that's working now. I went for RAIDZ1, despite a lot of internet protestations about it, as I basically only store movies/music/Time Machine backup there anyway. Been thinking about backup solutions for everything, but it all seems fairly expensive for what is essentially just backing up media. To people recommending Plex for media streaming, I would actually recommend Serviio over it. It took a little extra setup in a jail, requiring some extra port downloads, but it works extremely well in it's DLNA streaming to my PS3. Where it shone brighter than Plex for me was it's support for transcoding and subtitles - it transcodes and shows all of my H264 video files with ASS subtitles with all of the style intact. It also supported PGS subtitles, but my piddling processor didn't quite match up to it.

kiallmacinnes 10y ago
Off topic and a total tangent, but... Oh well! Plex has done transcoding, including subtitle burn in, for a LONG time. It's a modified (I think) ffmpeg they ship with the server.

baruch 10y ago

May as well ignore the "RAID is dead" screams. They are only FUD. Do make sure to run the scrub periodically though, that's the real defense against rebuild failures.

ksec 10y ago

Are there any Consumer NAS using FreeNAS?