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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

by 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).

by 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).