Hi,
What is the best NAS software as I am about to build my first NAS box!!
I will be starting with only two 1/1.5t HD's to start but will expand as/when needed. What software option would be best bearing in my a long term expansion plans.
Please note i would like some kind of RAID for data security.
Freenas:
I have been looking at freenas that looks great but if the HD's are configured in RAID it seem difficult at add additional drives, is this true?
unRaid
This looks very easy to add extra drives but they do charge for additional content and if my drives excess there limit i will have to pay
Would greatly like you opinion/experiences on using these two system so I can make up my confused mind!
Simple linux machine running software raid & lvm, freenas, opensolaris, unraid, whs plenty of options, all providing slightly different solutions.
Depends on largely what else you may want to do with your nas and also if you are more experienced in a given platform.
WHS for me - I use it for everything - adding/removing drives is a breeze - backs up all my pc's to a point where I can fully restore them from a boot disk if needed, it encodes & transcodes my videos, downloads stuff and the remote access is great - you can upload/download files from anywhere.
I use freenas--im a linux retard and i was able to get it fired up and running no problem. Has no issues talking to linux, xbmc live, or windows.
Right now my setup is really sloppy--i have on tb, three 500gig and 2 250s. some are formatted in the native freenas format, others are still NTFS. I have them all mounted as network drives on my xp download troll, works like a champ.
if you want more than a nas, Windows Home Server is where its at. im switching when i have the resources to build a true server.
Just finished building my NAS, woohooo
I chose unRaid in the end because how easy it was to expand
Built it out of old(ish) parts,
old 1 gig ddr2 ram
pentiun D processor (from ebay £6)
old mother board with sata connections and gigabyte lan
old USB pen drive
old case and PSW
2 x new 2T HD (1T available as running parity) but when i add another 1T i will have 2T and so on
Works straight away hardly no set up, and all data is backed up and safe(ish)
Deffo recommend as can now watch on any pc around the home with xbmc installed
std dvd stream well over wifi, hd works only over lan (as my wifi is not up to the task)
NAS tower now lives in the utility room out the way
I opted for OpenSolaris (free) and ZFS.
ZFS really seems like the way to go for large media collections - it has some amazing technology like dedup built in that I've used on my Music Library to transparently single instance any duplicate tracks and then snapshot the collection and clone it for my wife's iTunes to mess with (essentially creating a whole new library/share) without hardly any additional storage being consumed.
..and then there's all the error correction and speed benefits too.
hi,
i use FreeNAS on my old 2TB NAS,
an Windows Home Server on my 8TB NAS.
Both runns perfectly on my HTPC with XBMC on WIN XP SP3 and my Crystal Xbox with XBMC
VortexBox, it autorips CDs, has iTunes, and UPnP support out of the box. It install on any old PC in about 10 minutes.
I setup a server a couple months ago running unraid. Happy with it so far. Before that ran freenas for a few years. For my needs, I'm preferring unraid to freenas. Adding drives is easy and replacing or upgrading a drive is pretty easy as well. Unraid has a small but very helpful community.
Another thing, freenas is based on freebsd which has slower transfer speeds when using samba, unraid is linux based and doesnt have that issue.
UnRAID is really cool technology. Been following its development since he started and it'll work for anyone with a mishmash of different drive sizes.
Freenas has been out a while and is a go to system to build software RAID systems. I've run some benchmarks on identical hardware and found the linux based openfiler to be a little faster. These aren't that hard to set up, you can grow the disk size by adding additional identical sized disks, and run standard raid set ups that are used widely. (If you're openfiler doesn't boot for example, you can put a linux live cd in and access your disks).
Unraid and WHS have similar non-raid redunancy set ups and are popular options in the media serving route because of flexibility, mainly with attaching whatever disks you want to the system. I've been running hardware and software raid systems for years and so don't trust these new systems. This is just a personal opinion.
There are many appliances you can buy that are attractive if you already don't have a system to use. (Netgear/QNAP/Drobo-fs). Most of these sacrifice some performance for ease of use.
Some go the hardware raid route, if they want more performance or use their media server for other roles. I go this route with 3ware cards running two raid5 arrays.
skaymakca Wrote:Freenas has been out a while and is a go to system to build software RAID systems. I've run some benchmarks on identical hardware and found the linux based openfiler to be a little faster. These aren't that hard to set up, you can grow the disk size by adding additional identical sized disks, and run standard raid set ups that are used widely. (If you're openfiler doesn't boot for example, you can put a linux live cd in and access your disks).
Unraid and WHS have similar non-raid redunancy set ups and are popular options in the media serving route because of flexibility, mainly with attaching whatever disks you want to the system. I've been running hardware and software raid systems for years and so don't trust these new systems. This is just a personal opinion.
There are many appliances you can buy that are attractive if you already don't have a system to use. (Netgear/QNAP/Drobo-fs). Most of these sacrifice some performance for ease of use.
Some go the hardware raid route, if they want more performance or use their media server for other roles. I go this route with 3ware cards running two raid5 arrays.
A lot just depends on your level of expertise. If you are comfortable building your own, go with UnRaid or OpenFiler. If not, buy a prebuilt NAS and pay attention to the reviews. Whatever you build or buy, make sure you get gigabit networking. NFS (built into UnRaid and OpenFiler and available on some prebuilt appliances) is a better-performance option if available. I would avoid Drobo (bad history of failure/data loss, comparatively expensive) and FreeNAS (slower performance versus UnRaid and OpenFiler).
GJones Wrote:I would avoid Drobo (bad history of failure/data loss, comparatively expensive) and FreeNAS (slower performance versus UnRaid and OpenFiler).
freenas is in the middle of a full rewrite by ixsystems to freebsd 8
The current stable has AIO support, and svn samba 3.5.2 - assuming you don't have a rubbish network card, performance sacrifice compared to linux is a thing of the past
i like unraid since i don't have to waste harddrives to make a raid and still safe if one harddrive fails. With unraid i can have 1parity drive and 20 data drives and each drive could be any size as long as the size is not greater then the parity drive.