Live data from Hacker News

FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

freenas.org

11–20 of 182 posts

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#11
post #8

Although I don't think I'd ever DIY another NAS box, I would suggest the following, use a common chipset controller that exposes each drive/device separately with all information, some don't. Also, prefer a system with ECC, Asus supports ECC on most AMD FX supporting motherboards for the less expensive option there. Also, have 2 spare drives on hand. I went back to Synology after my uper-nas crashed and burned (reall…

Those 3TB Seagate drives are literally the worst in the business. The 2TB and 4TB are pretty good (roughly on par or better than competitors according to the backblaze reports) but those 3TB drives were utter shit for some reason, ~20% year over year failure rates.

Some retailers have even started to sell the 3TB Seagate drives at almost the same price as the 2TB ones. Probably the only way to get rid of them.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#13
I do love FreeNAS, at home and at the office too (for development purposes - I'd trust it for production but with our client base it's better to be more "corporate").

It has a good cross section of features from 'home' to 'pro', AFP/NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, directory integration, plugins (more aimed at home, with things like news downloaders, BT clients).

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#14
post #3

I've been using Unraid for a few months. It has a different - arguably inferior - parity strategy but has amazing support for VMs. I've got my gaming machine, my GPU dev box and a bunch of smaller services all in the same box and can do some really sweet online configuration.

How is it for gaming? I'd imagine it's using a VM solution (Xen HVM or KVM so it can do IOMMU?). I've been avoiding it because I figure that VM solution would get detected by anti-cheat in many games (particularly the nasty kernel level ones like EasyAntiCheat, GameGuard, etc).

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#15

Another open source option is Synology's Disk Station Manager which includes a bunch of open source software they've skinned and created mobile apps for so you can localize stuff like music streaming, dropbox, notes etc - https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo

Not open source.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#16
post #6

Once you go ZFS, you will never want to go back. True 'dat!

Once you go unison you will never want to go back.

I even run some ZFS without ECC memory, because if hardware goes bad and programmatically corrupts it isn't the end of the world.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#17
post #10

Another open source option is Synology's Disk Station Manager which includes a bunch of open source software they've skinned and created mobile apps for so you can localize stuff like music streaming, dropbox, notes etc - https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo

I cannot find the source code of DSM. Are you sure it is Open Source? If it isn't Open Source this is off-topic since there is a large number of other commercial NAS OS e.g. Thecus, SoftNAS, QNAP, Napp-It... Most of them tend to have an "app store" and some people building more or less working apps out of Open Source and free projects.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/Synology%20NAS%...

I think it's in there, their account's got a lot of files so it might be elsewhere. Latest version isn't published yet.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#18
Ooh, these FreeNAS boxes for the home are very nice: https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/

When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?".

The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#19
FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future.

I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago.

One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#20
I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system.

Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?

Post reply on HN