FreeNAS - Yay or Nay?

[stockhausen]

Has anyone here had any experience of installing and working with FreeNAS?

FreeNAS is an embedded open source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD, supporting the following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target) and UPnP.

It supports Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T/email monitoring with a WEB configuration interface (from m0n0wall). It works with a wide range of hardware.

FreeNAS can be installed on Compact Flash/USB key, hard drive or booted from LiveCD.

 

[stockhausen]

yes i do.

If you don't mind me asking:

• what hardware are you using it with?
• how easy / trouble free did you find it to install?
• how trouble free / reliable has it been in use?
• for how long have you been running it?
• what made you choose to run FreeNAS rather than buying a NAS box or building one based on Linux & SAMBA?
• anything else of interest about it?

I ask because I am thinking of building a fileserver based on it and would appreciate any evidence based feedback.

 

[stockhausen]

Thanks for all that Oxy - a 2.7GHz CPU and just 512Mb RAM - I am most impressed - just goes to show how memory efficient FreeBSD is!

I take it you have multiple drives in a RAID setup to offer 3TB? I was under the impression that there was an "issue" with > 2TB, how tricky was it to get over this (assuming it is actually a problem)?

I have already downloaded FreeNAS and based on what you have said, I will certainly set up a test / evaluation system with it - although in the initial instance, I will probably NOT go for 3TB.

Again, thanks for posting

 

[stockhausen]

...
What do you intend to use the server for? will you need torrents or usenet?

Initially, just general backup and (shared) storage around the house (.MP3s, photos, correspondence, etc.) - I wont be using Torrents or Usenet. If it works well, I may end up using it in a commercial environment.

Take a look at unRAID (http://www.lime-technology.com) if you're interested in having redundancy *and* expandability

Thanks for that, I have just had a look at it but will probably focus on FreeNAS initially. I was particularly amused by the following comment / offer from the unRAID site

Assemble a custom Media Server with up to 38TB of protected storage!

Start out by downloading unRAID Server for free! Unregistered unRAID Server supports up to 3 hard drives.

38TB huh??? Wow, that's amazing . . .

. . . oh, it has to be on 3 x HHDs in the case of the free unregistered version