7 ms·

FreeNAS 9.2 is out

82 points by tachion 13y ago

tachion 13y ago
FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and provides great platform (allowing you to use such awesome features like ZFS, BSD/Linux Jails virtualization and many others)for self made NAS appliances made out of any hardware available, but also for very solid business product (like TrueNAS), when proper hardware is used. Personally, I've switched to FreeNAS after being in love with Synology for many years.
- gitaarik 13y ago
  I have a Synology atm but I'm thinking of making a FreeNAS machine when I'm done with the Synology. What would you say are the biggest differences? What features did you miss the most? What features did you gain by using FreeNAS that you thought were very nice?
  - tachion 13y ago
    What I've really lost is a no-brainer solution, as in purchasing, plugging and that's it, I've also lost a vendor lock in but I dont really miss any of these ;) The most important thing I've gained is the reliability - in case Synology dies we're screwed until we're able to buy the same or close enough model in order to get back our data. With FreeNAS (and the bare FreeBSD based solutions people mentioned here) I can simply take out the disks and plug them into anything that has the ability to run FreeBSD/NAS to get back my data, since its just ZRaid on top of ZFS. I've also gained the flexibility of building the right NAS for my needs thanks to the wide hardware choice, FreeBSD and Linux Jails virtualization, and most things I really was afraid of, that are AFP support and Time Machine targets are there. And, the coolnes factor, you get a chance to dig around and build it on your own, gazzilion TB's of storage ;)
pibefision 13y ago
Is there a recommended motherboard or cpu to use this in a house?
- tachion 13y ago
  Basically, its anything that FreeBSD can run on (and that's a lot, on its own: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/hardware.html http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/hardware.html) and that will at the same time fill your needs (in terms of platform architecture, power consumption, number of available/supported IO/storage options, size and so on). If you're still unsure, there's a great community and forum available, and some general hardware guide can be found here (it covers entire NAS appliance): http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/ http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-...
  - pibefision 13y ago
    thank you!
- haswell 13y ago
  I built mine on an HP Proliant N36L MicroServer. There are doubtless newer models now, but these can usually be found for less than $300, and it ran out of the box flawlessly (though I added 8GB of RAM). Depending on your needs, this is a great platform - low power, small case, built with installing multiple drives in mind. This is the newest equivalent product: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107921 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107...
  - stock_toaster 13y ago
    I picked up an n54l recently. Slapped freebsd9/ZFS on it, and it has been working great so far.
rll 13y ago
I just built one recently. Motherboard-wise you should get one that supports ECC ram. Other than that it doesn't matter that much. You typically don't use the onboard SATA ports either, so the motherboard specs aren't very important. I built one recently. A bit of CPU overkill, but otherwise a pretty standard build. You can see the hardware list here: http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html
- rektide 13y ago
  What reasons are there for ignoring the onboard SATA ports?
  - freehunter 13y ago
    Well he has a RAID controller in his build, so I would assume you ignore the built-in SATA so you can use RAID. He's also using SAS connectors to convert four SATA cables into one SAS connector (to avoid having to have eight cables running from the drives to the board).
    - mdellabitta 13y ago
      No, FreeNAS uses ZFS for RAID. Generally, you want to disable any RAID features in your card so it presents the disks as JBOD to the OS to avoid incompatibilities, which he did.
  - rll 13y ago
    It is also hard to find a motherboard with 8 SATA ports. They are out there, but you end up getting them split across different types of controllers which makes things complicated. And since you can pick up an M1015 for around $100 and flash it to IT mode I see no point in messing around with shaky onboard SATA controllers.
    - tachion 13y ago
      Recently you can also get an Asrock Avoton motherboard with 12 SATA ports, spreaded across three controllers, but that shouldnt be any problem.
kudu 13y ago
How does this compare to NAS4Free (http://www.nas4free.org/ http://www.nas4free.org/), the original FreeNAS?
- tachion 13y ago
  They are very similar, yet very different at the same time ;) You can read more here: http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2013-02-22.freenas-vs-nas4free.html http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2013-02-22.freenas-vs-nas4free.h... and here: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/freenas-vs-nas4free.16422/ http://forums.freenas.org/threads/freenas-vs-nas4free.16422/
jmuguy 13y ago
Still no HyperV support for directly attached disks/raw storage :(
- tachion 13y ago
  FreeBSD 10.0 should be out soon (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/schedule.html http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/schedule.html) and there should be something there to make your day (http://vvm.blog.tut.by/2013/10/08/freebsd-10-on-hyper-v/ http://vvm.blog.tut.by/2013/10/08/freebsd-10-on-hyper-v/).
Axsuul 13y ago
I'm thinking about building a NAS this week. Any build recommendations, suggestions on where to start? I know people used to recommend NAS4Free over FreeNAS, is that still the case?
- crest 13y ago
  FreeNAS was suffering from technical debt because it was build on the code base of a firewall appliance for small CF cards. The project initiator gave up on it and it needed a rewrite. Most active contributors had a Linux background and wanted to use a Linux distro as starting point. At that point iX Systems moved in and offered to take over. They started the rewrite and leveraged the improvements made in FreeBSD. The new FreeNAS lacked some features home useres wanted e.g. a BitTorrent client and media streaming until the new plugin mechanism was ready. I'm a FreeBSD user and tend to avoid any automagic between me and the system but the FreeNAS 9.2.0 RC looked very promising.
  - dannypgh 13y ago
    I enjoyed a brief experience with FreeNAS but ended up wishing I had a full FreeBSD system -- it's easy to miss things like ports and the like. I was able to upgrade in-place to FreeBSD 9-STABLE however, which was a great experience. I probably should have better documented by upgrade-in-place procedure but at the time I didn't know whether it would work. It was fairly straightforward, using documentation for root on ZFS.
- tachion 13y ago
  I would recommend FreeNAS as this is what I've used, it has great community and serious company behind it and it seems to be more up to date with FreeBSD releases which is always a nice thing. When it comes to build recommendations, the main thing seems to be about RAM - you dont need a lot of it, contrary to popular belief, but you might want a lot, as ZFS loves large amounts of RAM (it can run with a smaller amout too, things like prefetch, and others, can be disabled). More important, you want the ECC RAM, given the ZFS unability to control memory errors. Beside that, you're free to do as you like, with a small advice of building at least RaidZ2 or even RaidZ3 (there are a lot of horror stories about people running RaidZ and loosing more than one disk in short time period).
tinfoilman 13y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937 Lowcost home file storage, HP Proliant Microserver (mine is N60L me thinkz) Can get cash back on it if you look around (sometimes 35% back) ECC memory 8gb max (recommended if going for ZFS) Western digital reds 3tb x 4 (reds have 3 year warrently and built for raid) ZFS in raid 2 i think. (one disk redundancy) Total space is about 7.9tb Running FreeNas from a usb inside the case. it works, and cost wise it was cheap minus the drives.
- BuildTheRobots 13y ago
  HP UK are currently offering £50 cashback on servers bought on/before the 31st December.[1] So basically, you've got until newyears to get one ordered. CCLonline[2] and ebuyer.com[3] are offering the servers for £180, so £130 after cashback. I've got one already at home and plan on ordering two more tomorrow. Surprisingly powerful boxes, can take upto 16gb DDR3 (ecc unbuffered), internal USB and proper hardware virtualisation. [1] http://h41225.www4.hp.com/UK_focus/PA0074%20-%20HP%20Microserver%20%C2%A350%20Cashback%20December%202013%20v2.pdf?jumpid=re_r10104_uk/en/ent/tsg/promoindex-ot-xx-pu-golden_offers_smb/chev-hp_microse_18068/ http://h41225.www4.hp.com/UK_focus/PA0074%20-%20HP%20Microse... [2] http://www.cclonline.com/product/108949/704941-421/Branded-Servers/HP-ProLiant-G7-MicroServer/SRV0383/ http://www.cclonline.com/product/108949/704941-421/Branded-S... [3] http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-microserver-ebuyer-704941-421 http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-micr... PS> "zfs in raid 2" -I believe you mean raidZ, the zfs equivalent of raid5. raidZ2 (zfs raid6) would only leave you with approx 6tb usable space rather than the 9 you're quoting. As the microserver has only 4 drivebays (well, 5 if you use the optical bay) you'd probably get better speeds and same real space by using the zfs equivalent of raid10 rather than raidz2.
  - Axsuul 13y ago
    Thanks, nice find! But doesn't the max RAM say 8 GB?
    - josephb 13y ago
aus_ 13y ago
ZFS is great. But one thing scares me away from using it. With ZFS, you can't just simply add a new disk raidz set. You have to either build a new pool to send your data to, or : 1. Buy the same amount of (but larger) hard-disks 2. Replace them one by one 3. After the last disk is done, the size will grow. 4. Sell your old hard-disks. Much more painful then other raid solutions.
- brianlweiner 13y ago
  Depending on how you have the arrays organized, I'm sure you can expand a zpool with additional sets. http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/expanding-a-zfs-pool/ http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/expanding-a-zfs-pool/ zpool add -f poolname raidz[or raidz1,raidz2,etc] /dev/driveid /dev/driveid /dev/driveid ... You'd then have a pool with another raidz section within it, whose size was represented by the capacity of each of the sections within.
- mbell 13y ago
  You can just add a new raidz (or any type of vdev) to the zpool.
- mannkind 13y ago
  For reference, you can also grow your pools by adding a new raidz array to an existing pool. Edit: Looks like mbell and brianlweiner posted just before me. Bah :)
- e12e 13y ago
  You can apparently add a new raidz, though. So adding 3 new drives would be possible (but not very efficient): http://alp-notes.blogspot.no/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-pool.html?m=1 http://alp-notes.blogspot.no/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-po... [edit: perhaps there should be a listing of "replies added since you hit reply"-function (with a "confirm" to reply anyway-button) to cut down on redundant replies.. and trade them for upvoting reasonable replies...]
sreitshamer 13y ago
Has anyone successfully written a FreeNAS plugin? My experience is with Linux, not FreeBSD, and I'm struggling to figure out how to package up my server as a FreeNAS plugin.

82 points by tachion 13y ago

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and provides great platform (allowing you to use such awesome features like ZFS, BSD/Linux Jails virtualization and many others)for self made NAS appliances made out of any hardware available, but also for very solid business product (like TrueNAS), when proper hardware is used. Personally, I've switched to FreeNAS after being in love with Synology for many years.

gitaarik 13y ago
I have a Synology atm but I'm thinking of making a FreeNAS machine when I'm done with the Synology. What would you say are the biggest differences? What features did you miss the most? What features did you gain by using FreeNAS that you thought were very nice?
- tachion 13y ago
  What I've really lost is a no-brainer solution, as in purchasing, plugging and that's it, I've also lost a vendor lock in but I dont really miss any of these ;) The most important thing I've gained is the reliability - in case Synology dies we're screwed until we're able to buy the same or close enough model in order to get back our data. With FreeNAS (and the bare FreeBSD based solutions people mentioned here) I can simply take out the disks and plug them into anything that has the ability to run FreeBSD/NAS to get back my data, since its just ZRaid on top of ZFS. I've also gained the flexibility of building the right NAS for my needs thanks to the wide hardware choice, FreeBSD and Linux Jails virtualization, and most things I really was afraid of, that are AFP support and Time Machine targets are there. And, the coolnes factor, you get a chance to dig around and build it on your own, gazzilion TB's of storage ;)

pibefision 13y ago

Is there a recommended motherboard or cpu to use this in a house?

tachion 13y ago
Basically, its anything that FreeBSD can run on (and that's a lot, on its own: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/hardware.html http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/hardware.html) and that will at the same time fill your needs (in terms of platform architecture, power consumption, number of available/supported IO/storage options, size and so on). If you're still unsure, there's a great community and forum available, and some general hardware guide can be found here (it covers entire NAS appliance): http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/ http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-...
- pibefision 13y ago
  thank you!
haswell 13y ago
I built mine on an HP Proliant N36L MicroServer. There are doubtless newer models now, but these can usually be found for less than $300, and it ran out of the box flawlessly (though I added 8GB of RAM). Depending on your needs, this is a great platform - low power, small case, built with installing multiple drives in mind. This is the newest equivalent product: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107921 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107...
- stock_toaster 13y ago
  I picked up an n54l recently. Slapped freebsd9/ZFS on it, and it has been working great so far.

rll 13y ago

I just built one recently. Motherboard-wise you should get one that supports ECC ram. Other than that it doesn't matter that much. You typically don't use the onboard SATA ports either, so the motherboard specs aren't very important. I built one recently. A bit of CPU overkill, but otherwise a pretty standard build. You can see the hardware list here: http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html

rektide 13y ago
What reasons are there for ignoring the onboard SATA ports?
- freehunter 13y ago
  Well he has a RAID controller in his build, so I would assume you ignore the built-in SATA so you can use RAID. He's also using SAS connectors to convert four SATA cables into one SAS connector (to avoid having to have eight cables running from the drives to the board).
  - mdellabitta 13y ago
    No, FreeNAS uses ZFS for RAID. Generally, you want to disable any RAID features in your card so it presents the disks as JBOD to the OS to avoid incompatibilities, which he did.
- rll 13y ago
  It is also hard to find a motherboard with 8 SATA ports. They are out there, but you end up getting them split across different types of controllers which makes things complicated. And since you can pick up an M1015 for around $100 and flash it to IT mode I see no point in messing around with shaky onboard SATA controllers.
  - tachion 13y ago
    Recently you can also get an Asrock Avoton motherboard with 12 SATA ports, spreaded across three controllers, but that shouldnt be any problem.

kudu 13y ago

How does this compare to NAS4Free (http://www.nas4free.org/ http://www.nas4free.org/), the original FreeNAS?

tachion 13y ago
They are very similar, yet very different at the same time ;) You can read more here: http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2013-02-22.freenas-vs-nas4free.html http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2013-02-22.freenas-vs-nas4free.h... and here: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/freenas-vs-nas4free.16422/ http://forums.freenas.org/threads/freenas-vs-nas4free.16422/

jmuguy 13y ago

Still no HyperV support for directly attached disks/raw storage :(

tachion 13y ago
FreeBSD 10.0 should be out soon (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/schedule.html http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/schedule.html) and there should be something there to make your day (http://vvm.blog.tut.by/2013/10/08/freebsd-10-on-hyper-v/ http://vvm.blog.tut.by/2013/10/08/freebsd-10-on-hyper-v/).

Axsuul 13y ago

I'm thinking about building a NAS this week. Any build recommendations, suggestions on where to start? I know people used to recommend NAS4Free over FreeNAS, is that still the case?

crest 13y ago
FreeNAS was suffering from technical debt because it was build on the code base of a firewall appliance for small CF cards. The project initiator gave up on it and it needed a rewrite. Most active contributors had a Linux background and wanted to use a Linux distro as starting point. At that point iX Systems moved in and offered to take over. They started the rewrite and leveraged the improvements made in FreeBSD. The new FreeNAS lacked some features home useres wanted e.g. a BitTorrent client and media streaming until the new plugin mechanism was ready. I'm a FreeBSD user and tend to avoid any automagic between me and the system but the FreeNAS 9.2.0 RC looked very promising.
- dannypgh 13y ago
  I enjoyed a brief experience with FreeNAS but ended up wishing I had a full FreeBSD system -- it's easy to miss things like ports and the like. I was able to upgrade in-place to FreeBSD 9-STABLE however, which was a great experience. I probably should have better documented by upgrade-in-place procedure but at the time I didn't know whether it would work. It was fairly straightforward, using documentation for root on ZFS.
tachion 13y ago
I would recommend FreeNAS as this is what I've used, it has great community and serious company behind it and it seems to be more up to date with FreeBSD releases which is always a nice thing. When it comes to build recommendations, the main thing seems to be about RAM - you dont need a lot of it, contrary to popular belief, but you might want a lot, as ZFS loves large amounts of RAM (it can run with a smaller amout too, things like prefetch, and others, can be disabled). More important, you want the ECC RAM, given the ZFS unability to control memory errors. Beside that, you're free to do as you like, with a small advice of building at least RaidZ2 or even RaidZ3 (there are a lot of horror stories about people running RaidZ and loosing more than one disk in short time period).

tinfoilman 13y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122937 Lowcost home file storage, HP Proliant Microserver (mine is N60L me thinkz) Can get cash back on it if you look around (sometimes 35% back) ECC memory 8gb max (recommended if going for ZFS) Western digital reds 3tb x 4 (reds have 3 year warrently and built for raid) ZFS in raid 2 i think. (one disk redundancy) Total space is about 7.9tb Running FreeNas from a usb inside the case. it works, and cost wise it was cheap minus the drives.

BuildTheRobots 13y ago
HP UK are currently offering £50 cashback on servers bought on/before the 31st December.[1] So basically, you've got until newyears to get one ordered. CCLonline[2] and ebuyer.com[3] are offering the servers for £180, so £130 after cashback. I've got one already at home and plan on ordering two more tomorrow. Surprisingly powerful boxes, can take upto 16gb DDR3 (ecc unbuffered), internal USB and proper hardware virtualisation. [1] http://h41225.www4.hp.com/UK_focus/PA0074%20-%20HP%20Microserver%20%C2%A350%20Cashback%20December%202013%20v2.pdf?jumpid=re_r10104_uk/en/ent/tsg/promoindex-ot-xx-pu-golden_offers_smb/chev-hp_microse_18068/ http://h41225.www4.hp.com/UK_focus/PA0074%20-%20HP%20Microse... [2] http://www.cclonline.com/product/108949/704941-421/Branded-Servers/HP-ProLiant-G7-MicroServer/SRV0383/ http://www.cclonline.com/product/108949/704941-421/Branded-S... [3] http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-microserver-ebuyer-704941-421 http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-micr... PS> "zfs in raid 2" -I believe you mean raidZ, the zfs equivalent of raid5. raidZ2 (zfs raid6) would only leave you with approx 6tb usable space rather than the 9 you're quoting. As the microserver has only 4 drivebays (well, 5 if you use the optical bay) you'd probably get better speeds and same real space by using the zfs equivalent of raid10 rather than raidz2.
- Axsuul 13y ago
  Thanks, nice find! But doesn't the max RAM say 8 GB?
  - josephb 13y ago

aus_ 13y ago

ZFS is great. But one thing scares me away from using it. With ZFS, you can't just simply add a new disk raidz set. You have to either build a new pool to send your data to, or : 1. Buy the same amount of (but larger) hard-disks 2. Replace them one by one 3. After the last disk is done, the size will grow. 4. Sell your old hard-disks. Much more painful then other raid solutions.

brianlweiner 13y ago
Depending on how you have the arrays organized, I'm sure you can expand a zpool with additional sets. http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/expanding-a-zfs-pool/ http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/expanding-a-zfs-pool/ zpool add -f poolname raidz[or raidz1,raidz2,etc] /dev/driveid /dev/driveid /dev/driveid ... You'd then have a pool with another raidz section within it, whose size was represented by the capacity of each of the sections within.
mbell 13y ago
You can just add a new raidz (or any type of vdev) to the zpool.
mannkind 13y ago
For reference, you can also grow your pools by adding a new raidz array to an existing pool. Edit: Looks like mbell and brianlweiner posted just before me. Bah :)
e12e 13y ago
You can apparently add a new raidz, though. So adding 3 new drives would be possible (but not very efficient): http://alp-notes.blogspot.no/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-pool.html?m=1 http://alp-notes.blogspot.no/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-po... [edit: perhaps there should be a listing of "replies added since you hit reply"-function (with a "confirm" to reply anyway-button) to cut down on redundant replies.. and trade them for upvoting reasonable replies...]

sreitshamer 13y ago

Has anyone successfully written a FreeNAS plugin? My experience is with Linux, not FreeBSD, and I'm struggling to figure out how to package up my server as a FreeNAS plugin.