Why is this a news story?
certainly because of recent Linus comments on ZFS
Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181
FreeNAS
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: FreeNAS
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/ I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.
I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.
Why is that?
Re: FreeNAS
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah 8GB seems excessive. My Synology has 2GB of RAM and does just fine. I run multiple docker containers on it aswell.
That’s likely because Synology doesn’t offer ZFS or anything near the same capabilities.
synology uses btrfs which provides almost the same capabilities, but ZFS usually eats all the RAM it gets as some sort of cache to speed up disk operations.
Re: FreeNAS
#24Previous threads for the curious:
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690
Re: FreeNAS
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/ I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.
I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.
Hah! I have been there. In the end I took the plunge and bought a DS218+.
- 2 bays so that I can run one big HD for storage and an SSD for software (backups in the cloud and on external drives)
- Intel CPU for best compatibility with software packages from third party sources and docker
- decent video playback support
I have had it for 1.5 years and haven't looked back. I don't run much on it other than Plex, torrents, syncthing and time machine backups. But it is so much better than my old laptop that I was using for all this before.
Re: FreeNAS
#26quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site: • "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended." • "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended." The example configuration for a…
FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements.
You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use.
However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.
Re: FreeNAS
#27Why is this a news story?
[deleted]
Re: FreeNAS
#28quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site: • "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended." • "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended." The example configuration for a…
With drive capacities topping 10TB and dedup being what it is, it's not too far of a stretch?
Those specs would be without dedup enabled (which generally isn’t in ZFS because it’s quite an expensive feature).
Re: FreeNAS
#29I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.
After some years of FreeNAS at home and in the company I've decided to go with Unraid for my home storage, it's just easier to add and change drives and the UI is more focused on storage too. Adding how easy it is to use e.g. NextCloud with Unraid I'm much happier than with FreeNAS.
Re: FreeNAS
#30I 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 g…
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.