FreeNAS 8 or OpenSolaris?

[Essexraptor]

Advice please guys for a Home Server/NAS

Toying with building up the above with bits and pieces hiding in the back of my stash cupboard ... I realise I may have to wait for the price of HDD's to fall but ....hey ho!

I need to be able to acccess the data from Linux (Desktop and Lappies), Win7 (a couple of desktops) and maybe even a Apple pad thing that my wife keeps nagging about

I just can't decide between FreeNAS 8 or OpenSolaris. I understand that I could use Server editions of mainstream *nix releases but I'm keen to give the ZFS system a go. Basically because it appears, so far, to be more flexible with adding more pools/redundancy etc.

Your ideas and thoughts would be welcomed. Don't worry I don't mind being called a plum if you think I'm barking mad

 

[Volitous]

See this for some useful stuff: http://www.zfsbuild.com/


EDIT: If you want to try freebsd 9 (currently in RC and available for download but will be out soon) - but you dont like the fact there is no GUI. Look at PC-BSD - its a FreeBSD install with the Desktop of your choice (though KDE by default). Its installer also lets you do easy vanilla freebsd installs

FreeBSD 9 RC has a much later version of ZFS than the 8.x series

 

[Essexraptor]

thanks for the reply

Useful info.

I've got a set of 4Gb DDR3 Dual coming in from RMA and I was going to try getting away with a 4 TB array in RAIDz or RAIDz2 with that. Should be ok?

Just wish these HDD prices would come down !

In the meantime I think I'll try to scrape together some more smaller drives and run a few tests/set-ups beforehand.

Might be a wise idea for a novice

cheers anyway

 

[si_]

Hi,

I run Nexenta with nappit (http://www.napp-it.org/index_en.html) as the web interface for my storage. It is running on an HP microserver with 8Gb RAM and run's ok for what I want. Looked at FreeNas and was very impressed but remember reading the ZFS performance may not have been as good as it could have been (this may be fixed now).

I looked as running Linux as the OS (as it is my preferred OS) but I really like the reliability of ZFS and the features that is brings so choose Nexenta as the OS.
For nearly a year it has been running really well and I have not had any issues with it. I use it to backup Linux using NFS, backup OSX using timemachine, backup Windows using CIFS shares, iSCSI targets for Xen vm's and it is great.

Definitely try some test setups as I did that prior to setting up the final build so I was happy with the space/performance etc.

I think if you try a BSD and create a ZFS pool you should be able to import that in an OpenSolaris system and vice-versa - not sure whether ZFS versions have to the the same though.

That zfsbuild link looks interesting.

Si