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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 take

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.
nickik 7y ago
I don't get this comment. You can use a cheap PC with ryzen and run samba on FreeNas. It seems to me you are mixing up what 'FreeNas mini' and 'FreeNAS Freebsd-based OS'.
- anon9001 7y ago
  What I'm saying is that the cost of being on a non-standard distro is greater than the benefit the freenas UI provides. Even if you want to run RAID, it's one or two commands with mdadm. FreeBSD and ZFS makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.
thefz 7y ago
> I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly I set up a 6 drive FreeNAS box in an old gaming computer I had around, just for the purpose of learning how it works. And out of love for BSD, of course. Not everything has to undergo a cost/benefit analysis, some like to play.
detaro 7y ago
Most people probably don't setup RAID/other redundancy schemes often enough to be able to do it confidently in 5 minutes on the command line, so why not use something that makes it easier?

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.

nickik 7y ago

I don't get this comment. You can use a cheap PC with ryzen and run samba on FreeNas. It seems to me you are mixing up what 'FreeNas mini' and 'FreeNAS Freebsd-based OS'.

anon9001 7y ago
What I'm saying is that the cost of being on a non-standard distro is greater than the benefit the freenas UI provides. Even if you want to run RAID, it's one or two commands with mdadm. FreeBSD and ZFS makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.

thefz 7y ago

> I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly I set up a 6 drive FreeNAS box in an old gaming computer I had around, just for the purpose of learning how it works. And out of love for BSD, of course. Not everything has to undergo a cost/benefit analysis, some like to play.

detaro 7y ago

Most people probably don't setup RAID/other redundancy schemes often enough to be able to do it confidently in 5 minutes on the command line, so why not use something that makes it easier?