[snowglyder]

I recently purchased a Dell 1950 on ebay for $240 to play with VMware. I've installed ESXi 5 on it already, and I've started to build out Linux servers. My plan is to virtualize my existing media server (sabnzbd, sickbeard, couchpotato, headphones, and Plex). One VM will serve media to XBMC and Plex clients throughout the house, and my plan is to build other VM media servers (thinking Plex) that a few family and friends can stream the content from and have their own library that pulls from the same source.

I'm stuck at trying to decide on a backend for storage. Right now I have HDDs connected to my media server (750GB usb, 1TB esata, 2-750GB sata). I have another custom tower with 6 bays that I plan on using. It's dual core, 4GB ram. I'd like to move all of my drives to the one box and make a NAS solution. Free would be nice, but if it's worth it I can spend a little money for the software. Currently I'm looking at unRAID, FreeNAS, FlexRAID, nexentastor, and SnapRAID (maybe). I'm getting 2-2TB drives donated for the project, so I could wait and build with new drives, move the data, then add the remaining drives (if possible). What I'd really like is speed and redundancy for drive loss. Would virtualizing any of these make more sense than putting it on the box? Maybe using 2 solutions together, one virtual pointing to physical (iSCSI)?

Any help or pointing in the right direction would be awesome. I think I'm reading about too many solutions and probably over thinking what's needed.

[snowglyder]

I think I've ruled out SnapRAID. I can appreciate the project and the work involved, but it's too young for me to feel comfortable trusting the integrity of my data with.

NexentaStor is more enterprise level, and probably not the right fit for what I'm trying to do, which is primarily media.

Lifehacker had a good article and demo video of FreeNAS which made it look compelling, especially with all the features it has to offer. The price is excellent too, as I could use the money on drives instead of licenses. So right now I'm thinking FreeNAS over unRAID and FlexRAID.

Anyone have any experience (good or bad) with FreeNAS? Any opinions having used FreeNAS, unRAID, or FlexRAID?

[xbmcg]

FreeNAS is OK so far - but there are two projects - the freeNAS 8 (the commercial branch) and the freeNAS 7/9 (the community maintained), that is more powerfull and even more up to date. There is also a solaris successor (eon NAS) based on open indiana and the latest & gratest zfs build after sun was accuired by oracle...

It could be driven to enterprise grade NAS solution with snapshot security and remote mirroring etc. I love it.

[snowglyder]

FreeNAS is OK so far - but there are two projects - the freeNAS 8 (the commercial branch) and the freeNAS 7/9 (the community maintained), that is more powerfull and even more up to date. There is also a solaris successor (eon NAS) based on open indiana and the latest & gratest zfs build after sun was accuired by oracle...

It could be driven to enterprise grade NAS solution with snapshot security and remote mirroring etc. I love it.

Thanks for the input. I haven't heard of Eon. Looks interesting. I like the idea of snapshots and dedup. Dedup might not help me much with my home environment, since I keep a pretty tidy datastore. Snapshots would've helped me on a few occasions. I'd like to have enough redundancy to lose 1 drive, but I don't have several drives of the same size. Some of the other solutions I've mentioned will do JBOD with a parity drive. Is this possible with Eon?

About using SSD for gained performance (cache drive), would I see the performance gain if I'm mainly streaming and downloading video?

[xbmcg]

freeNAS, EON and OI all are based on a unix Kernel (FreeBSD / Solaris) and use the UFS / ZFS (unix file system or zetabyte file system). ZFS implements various RAID levels (RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, tripple parity, 01, 10, ..) but by software and zfs also uses checksumming on all (directory paths, data etc,) so silent data rott is recognized and in case of redundancy auto-fixed. you can setup auto-creation of multiple copies for additonal data redundancy and you have various options to speed up both read (L2ARC) and write (ZIL) operations e.g. by adding SSD's as read cache or write cache and using striping. Deduplication and optional encryption is also available..

I prefer mirroring, even it is a little more expensive (more drives) it is easier to upgrade and delivers best read / write performance. If there are drive errors, just add another drive to the mirror, resilver the pool (resync) and later remove the failed drive.

Anyway, with zfs you are far beyond regular NAS stuff in regard of performance and security - if set up properly. The sharing protocols are also included in zfs tools, so you can just create smb shares / nfs shares directly from the zpool / zfs commands.

---

All you need to know about zfs / performance / tuning ... (great blog)

http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/04/t...erformance

[snowglyder]

You mentioned FreeNAS 7/9. Are you talking about OpenMediaVault? I looked at FreeNAS 8 and with the ZFS file system, write speeds weren't anything great using RAID1. Around 18MB/s. I'm guessing because my NAS box is dual core with 2GB ram. The overhead is pretty high, around 1GB without anything running or accessing the NAS. UFS seemed faster, but I decided to give install OpenMediaVault and test it out. It runs on Debian, which I'm more familiar with. Any opinions on OpenMediaVault? I like that the memory utilization is only around 2%, so my existing hardware should work fine, and it seems to offer what I need.

[Gink]

I've been running FreeNAS 7 for years as a storage/backup system + media server for xbmc, android tablets, itunes, etc. Running on an Athlon XP 2600+ w/ 1gig of RAM. Just have a couple Terrabyte drives in it and use rsynch to make daily backups of whatever I want backed up, though it supports various RAID configurations.

Recently I added sabnzbd and sickbeard to my setup, so now it automatically downloads tv shows and sends a message to each of my xbmc systems and updates their library when there's something new. Pretty handy for a dirt cheap setup.

[snowglyder]

I've been running FreeNAS 7 for years as a storage/backup system + media server for xbmc, android tablets, itunes, etc. Running on an Athlon XP 2600+ w/ 1gig of RAM. Just have a couple Terrabyte drives in it and use rsynch to make daily backups of whatever I want backed up, though it supports various RAID configurations.

Recently I added sabnzbd and sickbeard to my setup, so now it automatically downloads tv shows and sends a message to each of my xbmc systems and updates their library when there's something new. Pretty handy for a dirt cheap setup.

Have you tested read/write speeds? Just curious as to what you're getting. Openmediavault seems HORRIBLY slow. Starts off transferring at >100MB/s, then slows way down to 1-5MB/s over gigabit, that's for both XFS and EXT4 formats. Same system using FreeNAS 8 was writing at a pretty consistent 80MB/s, using UFS on a RAID1.