7 ms·

FreeNAS

34 points by basicplus2 7y ago

dev-il 7y ago
quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site: • "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended." • "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended." The example configuration for a "Home Media Server or Small Office File Share" even suggests "16 GB RAM". I've heard that ZFS is quite RAM hungry, but c'mon, 16GB for a home media server?
- gempir 7y ago
  Yeah 8GB seems excessive. My Synology has 2GB of RAM and does just fine. I run multiple docker containers on it aswell.
  - hestefisk 7y ago
    That’s likely because Synology doesn’t offer ZFS or anything near the same capabilities.
    - black3r 7y ago
      synology uses btrfs which provides almost the same capabilities, but ZFS usually eats all the RAM it gets as some sort of cache to speed up disk operations.
      - hestefisk 7y ago
        You are thinking of the ARC. By default, ZFS will allocate what is available but you can constrain it as you like.
- Namidairo 7y ago
  With drive capacities topping 10TB and dedup being what it is, it's not too far of a stretch?
  - pushpop 7y ago
    Those specs would be without dedup enabled (which generally isn’t in ZFS because it’s quite an expensive feature).
- chousuke 7y ago
  I ran a ZFS file server and VM host for years with 6GB of RAM. It'll work fine, just don't use dedup.
- pushpop 7y ago
  FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements. You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use. However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.
- radiowave 7y ago
  I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris, Illumos, and then Linux, continuously since 2009. (However, I have no experience of using it on FreeBSD.) I've always regarded FreeNAS's RAM recommendations as being weirdly high. The "1GB per terabyte" thing dates from when ZFS systems were being pushed as enterprise workgroup file servers (i.e. maybe hundreds of users), with all storage on spinning rust. I wager that a great many FreeNAS systems are seeing approximately one user, primarily accessing large media files which mostly don't benefit that much from caching. Though of course, if you really are using FreeNAS in a more demanding role, then the hardware should reflect that. I believe it did used to be the case that the FreeBSD port of ZFS had an issue where ZFS wouldn't always back off its RAM use fast enough, if the system came under memory presure, so it was at the time prudent to ensure that FreeBSD ZFS machines never got into low-memory situations, but I haven't heard anybody complain about that in practice in some years, so presumably it's fixed now, but FreeNAS's RAM recommendations have not been relaxed.
sircastor 7y ago
I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.
- gempir 7y ago
  I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/ https://xpenology.org/ I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.
  - jcims 7y ago
    I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.
    - casperc 7y ago
      Why is that?
      - jcims 7y ago
        I overanalyze everything.
    - climb_stealth 7y ago
      Hah! I have been there. In the end I took the plunge and bought a DS218+. - 2 bays so that I can run one big HD for storage and an SSD for software (backups in the cloud and on external drives) - Intel CPU for best compatibility with software packages from third party sources and docker - decent video playback support I have had it for 1.5 years and haven't looked back. I don't run much on it other than Plex, torrents, syncthing and time machine backups. But it is so much better than my old laptop that I was using for all this before.
hestefisk 7y ago
Why is this a news story?
- tczer 7y ago
  certainly because of recent Linus comments on ZFS
  - cpach 7y ago
    Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181
    - hestefisk 7y ago
      Linus’ comment on ZFS lacking new development / maintenance is really misleading. OpenZFS is doing both and there is a very large, vibrant development community.
- cpach 7y ago
  It’s not news per se. I upvoted since I’m interested in the discussion of various alternatives for storage (both for personal and business use). It’s also interesting because of the current kerfuffle regarding the future of ZFS. For people who want to read up on that, this thread is quite interesting: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-linux.68803/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tczer 7y ago
For those looking for a linux based NAS distribution, you should also take a look at openmediavault here https://www.openmediavault.org/ https://www.openmediavault.org/ It has been running on my home server for 5+ years now and it's a delight. It also supports ZFS through a plugin.
anon9001 7y ago
I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server. FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably got a lot more value than I'm willing to admit, and I'm sure that's why it's popular, but I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. JBOD is a totally valid strategy for a home disk array. Add in k parity drives and you can even recover from k total drive failures. RAID is not the end all be all of multi-disk storage.
- gregmac 7y ago
  I also looked at it a few years ago when I last rebuilt my media server, and ultimately decided the same. I now run SnapRAID [1] with mergerfs [2] and for my use, it's got many benefits over zfs and normal raid setups: I could start from my existing volumes, without having to move any files. I can use my random bunch of varying size disks purchased over several years, and add as needed. I tend to buy a new drive every couple years at whatever cheapest $/GB is, which means usually each drive is 2x the size of the last one I bought. If something catastrophic fails like the system itself, the disks are just normal independent ext4 volumes - I can read them from basically anything. I've had to recover a RAID5 array using replacement hardware before, it's not fun and not something I want to ever have to do at home. [1] https://www.snapraid.it/ https://www.snapraid.it/ [2] https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs
  - anon9001 7y ago
    I actually use RAID6 with mdadm, and it's also portable to different machines. I was kind of surprised the first time I moved the array to a new machine and it all just worked.
dang 7y ago
Previous threads for the curious: 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397
tdons 7y ago
Is there anyone here who prefers FreeNAS over vanilla FreeBSD+zfs and would like to share their experience? I've been running FreeBSD with zfs for many years. I'm unsure if it was the right decision, but I did learn a lot and it's been extremely stable after the initial setup :-)
spants 7y ago
If you are looking for something like this, try unraid.net. you can run docker templates and plugins, easily add storage and has a friendly community.
- throwaway77384 7y ago
  not the same, as it isn't free :)

34 points by basicplus2 7y ago

quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site: • "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended." • "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended." The example configuration for a "Home Media Server or Small Office File Share" even suggests "16 GB RAM". I've heard that ZFS is quite RAM hungry, but c'mon, 16GB for a home media server?

gempir 7y ago
Yeah 8GB seems excessive. My Synology has 2GB of RAM and does just fine. I run multiple docker containers on it aswell.
- hestefisk 7y ago
  That’s likely because Synology doesn’t offer ZFS or anything near the same capabilities.
  - black3r 7y ago
    synology uses btrfs which provides almost the same capabilities, but ZFS usually eats all the RAM it gets as some sort of cache to speed up disk operations.
    - hestefisk 7y ago
      You are thinking of the ARC. By default, ZFS will allocate what is available but you can constrain it as you like.
Namidairo 7y ago
With drive capacities topping 10TB and dedup being what it is, it's not too far of a stretch?
- pushpop 7y ago
  Those specs would be without dedup enabled (which generally isn’t in ZFS because it’s quite an expensive feature).
chousuke 7y ago
I ran a ZFS file server and VM host for years with 6GB of RAM. It'll work fine, just don't use dedup.
pushpop 7y ago
FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements. You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use. However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.
radiowave 7y ago
I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris, Illumos, and then Linux, continuously since 2009. (However, I have no experience of using it on FreeBSD.) I've always regarded FreeNAS's RAM recommendations as being weirdly high. The "1GB per terabyte" thing dates from when ZFS systems were being pushed as enterprise workgroup file servers (i.e. maybe hundreds of users), with all storage on spinning rust. I wager that a great many FreeNAS systems are seeing approximately one user, primarily accessing large media files which mostly don't benefit that much from caching. Though of course, if you really are using FreeNAS in a more demanding role, then the hardware should reflect that. I believe it did used to be the case that the FreeBSD port of ZFS had an issue where ZFS wouldn't always back off its RAM use fast enough, if the system came under memory presure, so it was at the time prudent to ensure that FreeBSD ZFS machines never got into low-memory situations, but I haven't heard anybody complain about that in practice in some years, so presumably it's fixed now, but FreeNAS's RAM recommendations have not been relaxed.

sircastor 7y ago

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

gempir 7y ago
I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/ https://xpenology.org/ I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.
- jcims 7y ago
  I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.
  - casperc 7y ago
    Why is that?
    - jcims 7y ago
      I overanalyze everything.
  - climb_stealth 7y ago
    Hah! I have been there. In the end I took the plunge and bought a DS218+. - 2 bays so that I can run one big HD for storage and an SSD for software (backups in the cloud and on external drives) - Intel CPU for best compatibility with software packages from third party sources and docker - decent video playback support I have had it for 1.5 years and haven't looked back. I don't run much on it other than Plex, torrents, syncthing and time machine backups. But it is so much better than my old laptop that I was using for all this before.

hestefisk 7y ago

Why is this a news story?

tczer 7y ago
certainly because of recent Linus comments on ZFS
- cpach 7y ago
  Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181
  - hestefisk 7y ago
    Linus’ comment on ZFS lacking new development / maintenance is really misleading. OpenZFS is doing both and there is a very large, vibrant development community.
cpach 7y ago
It’s not news per se. I upvoted since I’m interested in the discussion of various alternatives for storage (both for personal and business use). It’s also interesting because of the current kerfuffle regarding the future of ZFS. For people who want to read up on that, this thread is quite interesting: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-linux.68803/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

tczer 7y ago

For those looking for a linux based NAS distribution, you should also take a look at openmediavault here https://www.openmediavault.org/ https://www.openmediavault.org/ It has been running on my home server for 5+ years now and it's a delight. It also supports ZFS through a plugin.

anon9001 7y ago

I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server. FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably got a lot more value than I'm willing to admit, and I'm sure that's why it's popular, but I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly.

pmiller2 7y ago
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. JBOD is a totally valid strategy for a home disk array. Add in k parity drives and you can even recover from k total drive failures. RAID is not the end all be all of multi-disk storage.
gregmac 7y ago
I also looked at it a few years ago when I last rebuilt my media server, and ultimately decided the same. I now run SnapRAID [1] with mergerfs [2] and for my use, it's got many benefits over zfs and normal raid setups: I could start from my existing volumes, without having to move any files. I can use my random bunch of varying size disks purchased over several years, and add as needed. I tend to buy a new drive every couple years at whatever cheapest $/GB is, which means usually each drive is 2x the size of the last one I bought. If something catastrophic fails like the system itself, the disks are just normal independent ext4 volumes - I can read them from basically anything. I've had to recover a RAID5 array using replacement hardware before, it's not fun and not something I want to ever have to do at home. [1] https://www.snapraid.it/ https://www.snapraid.it/ [2] https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs
- anon9001 7y ago
  I actually use RAID6 with mdadm, and it's also portable to different machines. I was kind of surprised the first time I moved the array to a new machine and it all just worked.

dang 7y ago

Previous threads for the curious: 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397

tdons 7y ago

Is there anyone here who prefers FreeNAS over vanilla FreeBSD+zfs and would like to share their experience? I've been running FreeBSD with zfs for many years. I'm unsure if it was the right decision, but I did learn a lot and it's been extremely stable after the initial setup :-)

spants 7y ago

If you are looking for something like this, try unraid.net. you can run docker templates and plugins, easily add storage and has a friendly community.

throwaway77384 7y ago
not the same, as it isn't free :)