FreeNas questions/alternatives

implosiveturnip

implosiveturnip

implosiveturnip

Associate
Joined
24 Mar 2013
Posts
2,268
Location
C-137
Hi all

I am intending to throw together a little freenas box, and upon going to download freenas, I see that it requires 8gb RAM to function, which is a bit more than I was expecting. And more than I can give it: The board I'm going to use only has 2 slots, and I only have 2gb sticks spare. Bummer.

Are there any alternatives to freenas that provide the same functionality? Or is it safe to run the older 32 bit version that is no longer supported, but will run with 4gb RAM?
 
And while we are at it, spec me a cpu/board/ram for freenas, so I can compare what I already have, and have a good idea of what I need.

My needs are really quite low. The box will be serving files to two desktops and a laptop, and a few andriod/ios devices. There will be no transcoding or VMs required, absolutely nothing other than file serving, and maybe a bittorrent client too.
 
The main selling point of FreeNAS is its use of ZFS. If you don't need to use ZFS then there are plenty of other distros you can use that will work just as well.

I'd personally suggest plain Debian and working with the CLI, or OpenMediaVault if you can't be bothered with all that. Good selection of plugins, for BT (Transmission) and easy SMB sharing setup. Would be up and running within minutes.
 
Thanks for that. I found nas4free (the continuation of freenas after someone bought it from what I can tell) which will run fine on my (limited) hardware. I had a play with it in a VM last night and It's definitely something I can work with. I'll give openmediavault a shout tonight, as if it's that quick to get setup then that would be ideal.
 
Last edited:
implosiveturnip said:
Thanks for that. I found nas4free (the continuation of freenas after someone bought it from what I can tell) which will run fine on my (limited) hardware. I had a play with it in a VM last night and It's definitely something I can work with. I'll give openmediavault a shout tonight, as if it's that quick to get setup then that would be ideal.
Click to expand...
NAS4Free and OMV are both projects spawned off of FreeNAS (though completely separately). The former was spawned off the old FreeNAS project, while OMV was made by a former developer of FreeNAS. The impression I got when I installed it on my server was that OMV was more popular due to its plugin system (it does work well), so that's the route I'd take if I were you :)

That said, your needs are basic for this box so all would work fine. OMV just seems a little easier, that's all!

To be honest though I'd say that plain old CLI on a Debian box would actually be best, thinking about it a little more. Purely because OMV does setup drives in a strange way that I personally wouldn't do (mounts them all in /media/<UUID> without labels, just making it that bit more annoying if you ever need to SSH into the thing to manage files or do other manual...stuff). SMB and Transmission should both be easy to setup this way.
 
Last edited:
How much storage are you planning on having in the box?

FreeNAS will quite happily run with less than 8GB RAM, in fact I've ran my "FreeNAS" server with as low as 2Gb ram. The recommended guide line amounts are to offer the best disk performance due to the way ZFS uses RAM for caching.

I've double quoted FreeNAS above because its actually Debian but using ZFS which is where the RAM requirement spawns from
 
!bluetonic! said:
It may not be your strong point, but you've given a good Linux joke in your last post. :p
Click to expand...

Glad you noticed :D I'm not afriad of CLI or anything, I'm just lazy :/

As for how much storage I'm putting in, well, that all depends on what I can and can't do with freenas and ZFS to be honest.

I currently have 2 3tb drives in RAID 1 on an intel rapid storage thingymabob in my htpc. But I want the drives out and in a nas along with a pair of 360gb drives so all my main storage is on the network and always accessible.

I'd be happy to continue the RAID setup, but this isn't recommended. so I was thinking to re-format all the drives as zfs and pool together and create separate volumes/datasets for all my various bits and bobs and then just transfer everything to the new structure. I need to look into the pros & cons of ZFS though, as my knowledge is quite limited. I think I heard something along the lines of you need 1gb RAM for every 1TB storage you have under ZFS, not sure how true this is.
 
Need is a slightly loose term.

You can run with less as a NAS your unlikely to see any difference. The recommendation stems from ZFS being an enterprise file system as such the recommendations are minimums based on IO intensive applications. With 2GB RAM and 5 TB storage I saw little to no performance difference across gigabit ethernet, the differences we're only really visible when benchmarking the disk from a virtual machine running on the pool
 
that's good to know. Although I have manged to source x2 8gb sticks now, but I likely won't have them forever. Did a switcheroo with the missus' PC. It's only a metter of time before she realises :P

All being well the motherboard comes today,I have the case and all the other bits prepped and wired up so I should be up and running quite quickly and can have a proper play. I'm going to just faff around with all my spare drives and not put in my x2 3tb drives until i'm happy with everything. Don't want to inadvertently destroy all my data.
 
Just a quick update for anyone who was interested, I haven't abandoned the thread, I'm still waiting on a motherboard as the one I picked up from fleabay turned up with damaged pins in the CPU socket, so quite miffed about that. Never again!

I've ordered a board from a competeitior, but it turns out that it wasn't in stock so I'm stuck waiting for a delivery. If I'd have known that to begin with I would have found another board/supplier :mad:

So yeah, hurdles and all that jazz :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom