FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS?

darkscout · 2011-03-04 03:46

I stand corrected, looks like they finally have the ZPL in the latest beta of ZFS on Linux... and it's like magic!.

I went from OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 back to Debian. For some reason Solaris 11 was kernel panicing under heavy loads. I'm not sure if it was my CPU or what, but Debian seems rock solid. (After around 10-20 minutes of while [ 1 ];do nohup yes > /dev/null & done, solaris decided to give up.)

I'm THANKFUL I didn't upgrade my ZFS on my important partitions when Solaris Express 11 came out, otherwise they'd be un readable. I liked Solaris. It was a bit quirky but svcadm and the services were awesome, but I feel much more at home with Debian.... so to answer your question. It looks like it's definitely possible and I'm going to be seeing if I can do it...

Superorb · 2011-03-04 05:44

Soooo.... If Ubuntu is built on Debian, does that mean we can run ZFS on a future build of Ubuntu? Or is Ubuntu not even built on Debian and I'm way off Wink

darkscout · 2011-03-04 06:14

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS

Already there, or compile from source:
http://zfsonlinux.org/

I don't think it has any of the 'magic' like sharesmb and sharenfs, so you'll still have to install samba and nfs server and configure them separate.

But man, I feel like I just came home. Working on rebuilding my server tonight with Debian... Only downside is I don't think you can boot from ZFS.

Superorb · 2011-03-04 06:38

^^ Pretty cool, thanks.

darkscout · 2011-03-05 16:13

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.

XBMC installed from Debian Multimedia repository. ZFS Installed from source (probably going to mirate to that ppa)... and it all works.

I need to tinker some more since it's an AMD MoBo (Le'Sigh my old AMD Mobo had a Nvidia 8300 on it, but no more). I can play 1080p with the CPU alone, but I may try and get vaapi running on it.... no clue why. Just will.

bmcclure937 · 2011-03-06 07:02

Interesting developments in the past month for ZFS on Linux Big Grin

I am still happily running ZFS on my FreeNAS. I also run SAB, Couch Potato, and SickBeard with no issues...

In the future I may consider OpenIndiana, Solaris, or Linux (with ZFS). For now, FreeNAS meets all of my needs and I like running headless and controlling everything via WebGUI and SSH.

ctrlbrk · 2011-03-07 07:36

darkscout,

Are you running Debian 6 or Ubuntu?

What are your thoughts on ZFS on Linux vs ZFS-FUSE?

I installed Squeeze with the kfreebsd kernel last night and ran into some problems, see here. Also not listed is a performance problem -- even with "native" ZFS in kFreeBSD, I was only seeing 70-80MB/sec which is a fraction of what I was seeing with mdadm and XFS.

I'm looking at abandoning kFreeBSD and going back to a normal kernel so I can get XBMC installed, but my concern of poor ZFS performance is mounting, especially if I run it on fuse... thoughts?

Obviously for normal operation I don't need killer read/write performance, but this box also serves as a backup/archival station for me, and not being able to even max out a gigabit nic is concerning.

darkscout · 2011-03-07 18:42

There's also:
http://kqstor.com/

Who have debs built for 10.10 and 10.04, 2.6.35-22-server, no compiling needed.

I'm running Debian 6. ZFS on Linux seems to have loading issues, so I'm checking out the kqstor solution which so far is much better.

IMHO, ZFS on Linux/KQ Stor solution is better because it's at version 28 where as Fuse is still at 23, iirc. It's also a kernel module.

publicENEMY · 2011-07-22 11:40

This thread is long and im confused reading it. Which one is better suited for my needs?

What i need is a nas that can
1. Stream UPnP. DLNA is a plus but not required. Playing media from XBOX 360 or PS3 sucks anyway. I prefer XBMC Wink

2. Im poor. Cheapest solution is preferred.
3. I only buy new hd when my storage is full. I dont want to buy all hd early on.
4. Able to transcode for console is nice, but not required.
5. Will be use by me and my small family. 3 concurrent user at most.

From what i read, the biggest deal breaker from freenas is that you must have the same hd for all hd. you cant mix and match hd with different hd capacity or model number.
I dont care about speed as long as it is enough for me and my family. 3 concurrent user.
My data is movie media. Not family photos and the like. So recovery and backup isnt required, although is nice.

I dont know what else is relevant for guys like me. If somebody could point out, that would be nice.

From what i see, unraid serve me best. what do you guys think?

claypigeon · 2011-07-22 20:39

publicENEMY Wrote:This thread is long and im confused reading it. Which one is better suited for my needs?

What i need is a nas that can
1. Stream UPnP. DLNA is a plus but not required. Playing media from XBOX 360 or PS3 sucks anyway. I prefer XBMC
2. Im poor. Cheapest solution is preferred.
3. I only buy new hd when my storage is full. I dont want to buy all hd early on.
4. Able to transcode for console is nice, but not required.
5. Will be use by me and my small family. 3 concurrent user at most.

From what i read, the biggest deal breaker from freenas is that you must have the same hd for all hd. you cant mix and match hd with different hd capacity or model number.
I dont care about speed as long as it is enough for me and my family. 3 concurrent user.
My data is movie media. Not family photos and the like. So recovery and backup isnt required, although is nice.

I dont know what else is relevant for guys like me. If somebody could point out, that would be nice.

From what i see, unraid serve me best. what do you guys think?

IMO Unless you need some kind of data loss / recovery functionality don't bother with any of the RAIDish type offering, just use shares SMB or NFS shares from native linux of windows. For your upnp/dlna server use what ever you want, lots of free or paid options there.

If what you are concerned about is multiple volumes for your XMBC system, if you are in library mode and you have your sources set up it aggregates the volumes into a single view for you. So from a usability perspective it looks like one big volume of movies.

For example:

snippet from sources.xml showing 3 network volumes for Movies and 1 for TV
XBMC will aggregate all 3 sources as a single view of movies.

Code:

<source>

            <name>Movies Volume</name>

            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume 1/</path>

            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume/</path>

            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume2/</path>

        </source>

        <source>

            <name>TV Shows</name>

            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/TV/</path>

        </source>

Superorb Fan Posts: 458 Joined: Jun 2009 Reputation: 0	2011-03-04 05:44 Post: #222 Soooo.... If Ubuntu is built on Debian, does that mean we can run ZFS on a future build of Ubuntu? Or is Ubuntu not even built on Debian and I'm way off
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Superorb Fan Posts: 458 Joined: Jun 2009 Reputation: 0	2011-03-04 06:38 Post: #224 ^^ Pretty cool, thanks.
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