7 ms·

iXSystems, the company that develops FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS), makes their own hardware for it with full support and decent prices. TrueNAS has also come a

by gh02t 5y ago

iXSystems, the company that develops FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS), makes their own hardware for it with full support and decent prices. TrueNAS has also come a very long way in the past couple of years, before it used to be a bit rough around the edges but it's now a very solid competitor especially running on their hardware. The one potential downside is it's not as beginner friendly as Synology or QNAP UI-wise, but I actually like that about it as I'm not a fan of the UI on either.

kalleboo 5y ago
The major downside to ZFS-based systems like TrueNAS is that for a home or small business user you can't expand the storage with a new drive when you're running low on space. It's designed for data centers where you can afford to build a whole new array when you need more storage. With Synology you go "oh, I'm down to 1 TB free, well there's this deal on a 10 TB drive, pop it in, now I have 11 TB free"
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  This isn't really true: you can add new vdevs at any time: when you start running low, you just buy two drives and install them.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    Right, 2 drives. Not "a new drive". Now you're buying twice as many disks as you would with a Synology and wasting 50% of your capacity on parity. And you better have set up your initial array with 2 drive vdevs as well or you're going to have a sub-optimal experience. This is the attitude I see a lot in ZFS support forums. "I don't see the problem, just buy twice as many drives!"
    - jjav 5y ago
      > This is the attitude I see a lot in ZFS support forums. "I don't see the problem, just buy twice as many drives!" This is incorrect on several levels. You most certainly can create a vdev with a single drive in it and add it to the zfs pool. So go ahead, buy that single 10TB drive and add it to your pool. That's not a wise thing to do though, so I don't understand why you'd want to. You'll have no redundancy at all, as soon as the drive dies everything is lost. Which pretty much completely defeats the point of having a NAS. So don't do that. But if you really want to, you can.
      - katbyte 5y ago
        But doesn’t that come back to their point? With syno you pop in a new disk and it rebuilds the array with the new disk and you have more space and the same redundancy? Raid 5/6 whichever
      - KozmoNau7 5y ago
        With btrfs, you can add one or however many new devices you want to a storage pool, then rebalance to ensure redundancy across the whole pool. If the device you add is already btrfs formatted, its contents get added to the storage pool, rather than requiring a reformat. It really surprises me that zfs apparently cannot do this. The main reason I use btrfs is the flexibility. Subvolumes instead of partitions, and easy expandability. Storage should be dynamic, not static.
        fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        They have dRAID, but last I checked RAID 5/6 is basically asking for data loss with modern drive sizes.
        kalleboo 5y ago
        > last I checked RAID 5/6 is basically asking for data loss with modern drive sizes This is a debate I would love to see with people who have experience. Since I've seen individuals speak with authority on both sides. I get that if you have a basic array of disks humming along with a big-ass ext4 partition, once one drive dies, the risk of the other drives being riddled with errors is huge. But what if your array is both (1) using ZFS or BTRFS (with data checksumming) and (2) has scheduled full-disk data scrubs once a month or so? Wouldn't you catch the initial recoverable errors quick enough?
        jjav 5y ago
        > Wouldn't you catch the initial recoverable errors quick enough? Not always no. I've had drives reporting failures for months that zfs scrub keeps fixing, tons of time to get a spare. But drives also fail suddenly with no history of zfs or SMART errors.
  - dzeanah 5y ago
    User of both QNAP devices and one of the iX systems devices here. ZFS is sexy, but it requires planning and understanding and (as stated by another poster) adding storage in pairs of drives if you want to increase storage incrementally and maintain drive redundancy. One of the perks of something like a QNAP or a Synology is the support for simply adding a single new drive to an existing RAID5 or RAID6 array, and having the storage box add it transparently while data is migrated to the new, larger RAID array. You pop in another 10TB drive in your RAID6 array and you increase the size of the array 10TB as you'd expect. Or, if you've finally outgrown your 6-bay device which is full of 3TB drives, you can replace the existing drives with 12TB drives, then once they've all been replaced increase the size of the array to match the new drive sizes. This is done while the device is running and serving data - no downtime, though things may slow down as you would expect during migration operations. From an end-user perspective this is a very different experience. Yes, FreeNAS/TrueNAS is cool, but I put a Synology at my dad's house.
    - hestefisk 5y ago
      The scenario you mention can easily be done with ZFS as well. I run a raidz1 and recently migrated from 3x4TB drives to 3x10TB. I bought one drive at a time and gradually expanded the pool. For each new drive I added I simply had to resilver the pool and I was done.
- jjav 5y ago
  You most certainly can add drives to a zfs pool to expand it. I've been running zfs on my file servers for ~17 years, have expanded the pool many times. In all that time I've only built a new machine once. Currently still running on my 2009 file server build. I've swapped and added drives to it over the years though.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    > You most certainly can add drives to a zfs pool to expand it. You can't replace drives with bigger ones and expand the pool. This is important, if you have 4/5/6/8 bay chasis and exactly the same amount of drives in the pool.
    - xoa 5y ago
      >You can't replace drives with bigger ones and expand the pool. Yes you can. That's exactly what the 'autoexpand' property is for. It's odd how this kind of thing floats around on the internet.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        Just because there's a property doesn't mean that it works. It floats around on the internet, because that's the experience people have.
        rleigh 5y ago
        It works just fine. I've upgraded vdevs this way several times, and it worked without a hitch on every occasion.
        vetinari 5y ago
        It didn't for me; in the end, I backed up the files, scraped the machine and put the drives into Synology box. So take it as an piece of the puzzle why is Synology more popular.
    - 5y ago
techrat 5y ago
> makes their own hardware for it All of their hardware is off the shelf parts, including the case, the motherboard and the drives. I built my own FreeNAS setup using the same components that FreeNAS was selling bundled together at the time. It ended up being about 2/3rds the price.
- gh02t 5y ago
  This is true, but it's more about support. iXSystems provides full testing and support on their hardware, which OP mentioned as a want. DIY is cheaper, especially since you have the option to buy used parts, but the premade systems are actually reasonably priced especially compared to some of the markups on Synology hardware.

by gh02t 5y ago

kalleboo 5y ago

The major downside to ZFS-based systems like TrueNAS is that for a home or small business user you can't expand the storage with a new drive when you're running low on space. It's designed for data centers where you can afford to build a whole new array when you need more storage. With Synology you go "oh, I'm down to 1 TB free, well there's this deal on a 10 TB drive, pop it in, now I have 11 TB free"

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
This isn't really true: you can add new vdevs at any time: when you start running low, you just buy two drives and install them.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  Right, 2 drives. Not "a new drive". Now you're buying twice as many disks as you would with a Synology and wasting 50% of your capacity on parity. And you better have set up your initial array with 2 drive vdevs as well or you're going to have a sub-optimal experience. This is the attitude I see a lot in ZFS support forums. "I don't see the problem, just buy twice as many drives!"
  - jjav 5y ago
    > This is the attitude I see a lot in ZFS support forums. "I don't see the problem, just buy twice as many drives!" This is incorrect on several levels. You most certainly can create a vdev with a single drive in it and add it to the zfs pool. So go ahead, buy that single 10TB drive and add it to your pool. That's not a wise thing to do though, so I don't understand why you'd want to. You'll have no redundancy at all, as soon as the drive dies everything is lost. Which pretty much completely defeats the point of having a NAS. So don't do that. But if you really want to, you can.
    - katbyte 5y ago
      But doesn’t that come back to their point? With syno you pop in a new disk and it rebuilds the array with the new disk and you have more space and the same redundancy? Raid 5/6 whichever
    - KozmoNau7 5y ago
      With btrfs, you can add one or however many new devices you want to a storage pool, then rebalance to ensure redundancy across the whole pool. If the device you add is already btrfs formatted, its contents get added to the storage pool, rather than requiring a reformat. It really surprises me that zfs apparently cannot do this. The main reason I use btrfs is the flexibility. Subvolumes instead of partitions, and easy expandability. Storage should be dynamic, not static.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        They have dRAID, but last I checked RAID 5/6 is basically asking for data loss with modern drive sizes.
        kalleboo 5y ago
        > last I checked RAID 5/6 is basically asking for data loss with modern drive sizes This is a debate I would love to see with people who have experience. Since I've seen individuals speak with authority on both sides. I get that if you have a basic array of disks humming along with a big-ass ext4 partition, once one drive dies, the risk of the other drives being riddled with errors is huge. But what if your array is both (1) using ZFS or BTRFS (with data checksumming) and (2) has scheduled full-disk data scrubs once a month or so? Wouldn't you catch the initial recoverable errors quick enough?
        jjav 5y ago
        > Wouldn't you catch the initial recoverable errors quick enough? Not always no. I've had drives reporting failures for months that zfs scrub keeps fixing, tons of time to get a spare. But drives also fail suddenly with no history of zfs or SMART errors.
- dzeanah 5y ago
  User of both QNAP devices and one of the iX systems devices here. ZFS is sexy, but it requires planning and understanding and (as stated by another poster) adding storage in pairs of drives if you want to increase storage incrementally and maintain drive redundancy. One of the perks of something like a QNAP or a Synology is the support for simply adding a single new drive to an existing RAID5 or RAID6 array, and having the storage box add it transparently while data is migrated to the new, larger RAID array. You pop in another 10TB drive in your RAID6 array and you increase the size of the array 10TB as you'd expect. Or, if you've finally outgrown your 6-bay device which is full of 3TB drives, you can replace the existing drives with 12TB drives, then once they've all been replaced increase the size of the array to match the new drive sizes. This is done while the device is running and serving data - no downtime, though things may slow down as you would expect during migration operations. From an end-user perspective this is a very different experience. Yes, FreeNAS/TrueNAS is cool, but I put a Synology at my dad's house.
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    The scenario you mention can easily be done with ZFS as well. I run a raidz1 and recently migrated from 3x4TB drives to 3x10TB. I bought one drive at a time and gradually expanded the pool. For each new drive I added I simply had to resilver the pool and I was done.
jjav 5y ago
You most certainly can add drives to a zfs pool to expand it. I've been running zfs on my file servers for ~17 years, have expanded the pool many times. In all that time I've only built a new machine once. Currently still running on my 2009 file server build. I've swapped and added drives to it over the years though.
- vetinari 5y ago
  > You most certainly can add drives to a zfs pool to expand it. You can't replace drives with bigger ones and expand the pool. This is important, if you have 4/5/6/8 bay chasis and exactly the same amount of drives in the pool.
  - xoa 5y ago
    >You can't replace drives with bigger ones and expand the pool. Yes you can. That's exactly what the 'autoexpand' property is for. It's odd how this kind of thing floats around on the internet.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      Just because there's a property doesn't mean that it works. It floats around on the internet, because that's the experience people have.
      - rleigh 5y ago
        It works just fine. I've upgraded vdevs this way several times, and it worked without a hitch on every occasion.
        vetinari 5y ago
        It didn't for me; in the end, I backed up the files, scraped the machine and put the drives into Synology box. So take it as an piece of the puzzle why is Synology more popular.
  - 5y ago

techrat 5y ago

> makes their own hardware for it All of their hardware is off the shelf parts, including the case, the motherboard and the drives. I built my own FreeNAS setup using the same components that FreeNAS was selling bundled together at the time. It ended up being about 2/3rds the price.

gh02t 5y ago
This is true, but it's more about support. iXSystems provides full testing and support on their hardware, which OP mentioned as a want. DIY is cheaper, especially since you have the option to buy used parts, but the premade systems are actually reasonably priced especially compared to some of the markups on Synology hardware.