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+--- Thread: FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS? (/showthread.php?tid=82811)
- harryzimm - 2010-10-13
Unraid is the best..... That's right i said it..
- PANiCnz - 2010-10-14
I hate to fire up an already heated debate but everyone also seems to be ignoring the performance benefits that ZFS has, especially with coupled with ARC and L2ARC. When researching unRAID I'm pretty sure its widely acknowledged performance isn't great.
froggit Wrote:Yep: It seems the ZFS advocates here are you, me and panicnzI think its might just be a case of us three being the only ones who've taken the time to read all the ZFS articles on the net and fully understand them.
I agree that ZFS realtime checking to guard against bitrot is probably one of its biggest selling points, until you've seen a few hundred gigs of data slowly corrupt without your knowledge you won't truly appreciate it.
unRAID is just JBOD with parity, I guess it serves its purpose.
- froggit - 2010-10-14
poofyhairguy Wrote:Happy Birthday!
Thanks!
- froggit - 2010-10-14
TugboatBill Wrote:+1
Thanks too!
- froggit - 2010-10-14
PANiCnz Wrote:I think its might just be a case of us three being the only ones who've taken the time to read all the ZFS articles on the net and fully understand them.
Yep, the reading busted my brain a bit, but I feel much better now
PANiCnz Wrote:I agree that ZFS realtime checking to guard against bitrot is probably one of its biggest selling points, until you've seen a few hundred gigs of data slowly corrupt without your knowledge you won't truly appreciate it.
Yep it's hard to sell a solution to a problem that some people don't even know exists, or think that it will never affect them.
Over the years, all those files that fail to open, or give an error message, or fail to run, or corruption is detected: these are most probably victims of bit rot, and when this happens people just say 'oh what happened there, oh well, never mind'. Of course, if it was something important they might follow that with a few expletives etc
- kaiser423 - 2010-10-14
TugboatBill Wrote:To make it succinct - If you really feel that the vanishingly small probability of bit rot could affect you then by all means set up a server with ZFS. Just make sure you address everything that is of higher risk, which is just about anything you can think of.
Oh, also make sure you place your server in a lead box, cosmic radiation can affect your data too.
Uh, bits flipped by cosmic radiation is exactly the type of thing that zfs protects against.........
On a different note: unRAID works well for people whom are scared of what to do. I'm not a big fan, but it does have some pretty appealing features like a disk being mountable outside of the RAID configuration for those non-technical users. It is a layer built on top of the typical RAID stack, so there is some extra complexity and overhead to make it happen. It's really utilizing the standard RAID utilities with some extra modules plugged in/removed. Makes me a little scared, and I wonder why I would need to pay money/go with a specific company's solution just to get a small layer of top of the typical RAID system. But they do provide a good product, so that's worth something.
FreeNAS is what I run at home. It's BSD based, so it's pretty solid. If you have some funky hardware though, BSD is not known for their extensive drivers list like say Linux or Windows. They just support the tried and true mainstream stuff. With FreeNAS, you can use ZFS, which is what I would recommend; it's faster than all of your other options AND gives you more data protection. The WebGUI for FreeNAS is absolutely *excellent* in my opinion. I installed FreeNAS, hit the web interface for it, set up up my ZFS RAID pools, mount points, network shares, samba shares, ftp, uPnP, bittorent, etc all with just a couple of clicks. I also set up rsync to dump automatic backups every night to an external server, with daily bit-change backups, and full rotating monthly backups with a couple of clicks and typing a couple of lines. It's really feature-packed. I'm loving the bittorrent with RSS subscriptions to automatically download and put everything in the right folders.
It really just comes down to the end user's comfort with the whole thing. I think that FreeNAS shouldn't be too scary since the WebGUI can get everything set up in a couple of clicks. I even installed the RSS extension via the WebGUI. I have once or twice had to change permissions on some items, but I think that was my fault for tinkering around anyways. With ZFS, I wanted to upgrade the size of my array. I had 4 320GB disks, and I just started buying 1TB disks whenever I had some spare change. About every month I bought a new 1TB drive and replaced one of my 320GB drives while the system was running with no down time. When the 4th drive was replaced, it automagically saw that everything was bigger and updated the size of everything. Never even had to shut down anything or click a button. Pretty slick.
I don't have any experience with unRAID, but it seems to work for quite a few people.
- PatrickVogeli - 2010-10-14
outside of the RAID? unRaid doesn't make use of any raid, hence the name. It's basically a JBOD with parity.
And, now, excuse me, this discussion is getting boring... it was fine a few pages back, but right now it's much like one of those fanboys Vs fanboys thread. Yeah, of course, we are more polite! And, not including myself, very technical.
From my point of view, ZFS is great if you care a lot about your data and not that much about your money while unRaid is great if you aren't that worried about losing data and are more interested in getting the max out of your drives.
Of course, there are other features to keep in mind, like unRaid's capacity to let unused drives spin down or ZFS security features.
If I had to choose, I'd get unraid: I can start with as little as 2 drives and keep growing up to 20, while I don't have to worry about setting up any kind of raid and I can forget about vdevs and pools and that stuff. Yeah, one day I MAY loose some films, but I really don't care too much about it. Also, really important data is stored in laptop, external hdd, another external hdd and the htpc, so it's redundant enough for me.
Patrick
Oh, nealy forgot: that's only my opinion, and I may have lost some points, so that's it..
- poofyhairguy - 2010-10-14
PANiCnz Wrote:I hate to fire up an already heated debate but everyone also seems to be ignoring the performance benefits that ZFS has, especially with coupled with ARC and L2ARC. When researching unRAID I'm pretty sure its widely acknowledged performance isn't great.
ZFS and normal RAID 5/6 will beat Unraid in performance because the data is stripped. I have seen some crazy performance numbers from ZFS in particular with a SSD cache.
But with that said, Unraid is more than enough to stream multiple HD streams to multiple clients, and the lack of striping is why you can pull out the disks and read them, why hard drives spin down while not in use, and how Unraid can have parity with different sized drives.
So its about fitting your needs. Each to their own.
- darkscout - 2010-10-14
poofyhairguy Wrote:But with that said, Unraid is more than enough to stream multiple HD streams to multiple clients
Unless they want to watch the same thing.
- gadgetman - 2010-10-14
UnRAID is great, I love it. But I hate their tech support, it's virtually non existant. You need to depend on the community forum to troubleshoot things.
- GJones - 2010-10-14
gadgetman Wrote:UnRAID is great, I love it. But I hate their tech support, it's virtually non existant. You need to depend on the community forum to troubleshoot things.
Which is horrible, since you are commenting on the lack of quality of community support on the community support forum for another piece of software.
I've seen few people have a problem with unRAID: buy hardware that is certified and it works. I've asked quite a few questions along the way and never had to wait more than an hour or two to get not just an answer but the correct one.
- GJones - 2010-10-14
darkscout Wrote:Unless they want to watch the same thing.
I'd love to see the specifics on this issue. Striping would have the same issue to nearly the same extent in most configurations.
How many times do you have the situation where two different clients are streaming the same HD show to two different clients. In my home we tend to watch the same show/movie together instead of apart.
- poofyhairguy - 2010-10-14
darkscout Wrote:Unless they want to watch the same thing.
Unraid is more than capable of streaming THE SAME HD movie to up to three clients. I have tried. In fact I tried with the "free version" before paying for the pro and that is what convinced me to put down the money.
It makes sense as a lone HD by itself can do that, and Unraid basically gives performance slightly below what HDs by themselves offer (due to the slight overhead for the user shares).
More than three clients (Or maybe EXTREMELY high bitrate HD content like 40GB pure Blu Ray rips) will have trouble, and for those cases maybe a ZFS server (and a pretty awesome gigabit network) would be needed. But honestly how often will a family watch the exact same show in more than one room at once, and how many consumers have network hardware that can take those loads?
- TugboatBill - 2010-10-15
Why would you want to watch the same thing 3X off the same NAS/server simultaneously?
- darkscout - 2010-10-15
TugboatBill Wrote:Why would you want to watch the same thing 3X off the same NAS/server simultaneously?
It was a case to illustrate a point.
What if you have 3 people watching different things that happen to be on the same hard drives? Something at the beginning of the 1st platter. Something at the middle and something at the end of the 3rd platter?
Technically it should work given that SATA is 3Gb/s. But given you have 3 different clients trying to access 3 different points on he same hard drive at the same time...