FreeNAS

https://www.freenas.org/

by basicplus2 • 7 years ago

34 46 7 years ago

dev-il• 7 years ago

quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site:

• "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended."

• "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended."

The example configuration for a "Home Media Server or Small Office File Share" even suggests "16 GB RAM".

I've heard that ZFS is quite RAM hungry, but c'mon, 16GB for a home media server?

gempir2• 7 years ago

Yeah 8GB seems excessive. My Synology has 2GB of RAM and does just fine. I run multiple docker containers on it aswell.

hestefisk4• 7 years ago

That’s likely because Synology doesn’t offer ZFS or anything near the same capabilities.

Namidairo• 7 years ago

With drive capacities topping 10TB and dedup being what it is, it's not too far of a stretch?

pushpop2• 7 years ago

Those specs would be without dedup enabled (which generally isn’t in ZFS because it’s quite an expensive feature).

chousuke• 7 years ago

I ran a ZFS file server and VM host for years with 6GB of RAM. It'll work fine, just don't use dedup.

pushpop2• 7 years ago

FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements.

You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use.

However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.

radiowave2• 7 years ago

I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris, Illumos, and then Linux, continuously since 2009. (However, I have no experience of using it on FreeBSD.) I've always regarded FreeNAS's RAM recommendations as being weirdly high. The "1GB per terabyte" thing dates from when ZFS systems were being pushed as enterprise workgroup file servers (i.e. maybe hundreds of users), with all storage on spinning rust. I wager that a great many FreeNAS systems are seeing approximately one user, primarily accessing large media files which mostly don't benefit that much from caching. Though of course, if you really are using FreeNAS in a more demanding role, then the hardware should reflect that.

I believe it did used to be the case that the FreeBSD port of ZFS had an issue where ZFS wouldn't always back off its RAM use fast enough, if the system came under memory presure, so it was at the time prudent to ensure that FreeBSD ZFS machines never got into low-memory situations, but I haven't heard anybody complain about that in practice in some years, so presumably it's fixed now, but FreeNAS's RAM recommendations have not been relaxed.

sircastor2• 7 years ago

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

gempir2• 7 years ago

I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/

I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.

jcims2• 7 years ago

I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.

ObsoleteNerd• 7 years ago

I did the exact same thing. A year on FreeNAS which did “work” but required so much fiddling that I bought a Synology and have never looked back.

dijit2• 7 years ago

Wait, ZFS requires maintenance?

I’ve been running freenas for years and have deployed/ran ZFS solutions as part of my job for a decade- this is the first I’m learning about that, it’s usually set and forget.

Am I just a bad admin?

Godel_unicode2• 7 years ago

Somewhat depends. Scrubbing is about detecting bit rot. You need to make sure that all of your data is periodically accessed so that zfs can check for errors. You can accomplish this either by having a workload which touches all of your data on a regular basis or by scrubbing. Depends on your setup.

moviuro• 7 years ago

ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

According to FreeBSD's handbook[0], you only need to scrub the drives once a month, and check `zpool status` regularly.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html

My crontab:

  # scrub
  0       1       1,15    *       *       zpool scrub zroot
  0       8       5,20    *       *       send_admin_email "zpool status" "$(zpool status)"

dijit2• 7 years ago

FreeNAS does this as a scheduled job though.

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

After some years of FreeNAS at home and in the company I've decided to go with Unraid for my home storage, it's just easier to add and change drives and the UI is more focused on storage too. Adding how easy it is to use e.g. NextCloud with Unraid I'm much happier than with FreeNAS.

hkchad• 7 years ago

Same here, I ran FreeNAS for 3+ years ZFS and all that. After having a drive die, replacing the wrong drive, trying to recover and loosing all the data (I had a 2month old drive in a Bank safe so was able to recover) but after that I switch to Synology that provides a nice blinking light for the failed drive, auto updating OS, surveillance, plex, etc I never looked back. Since then I've bought at least 10 more for work and family. Sure a drive dies every few years but w/ RAID6 and Amazon a swap is 2 days away click repair move on. Coupled w/ B2 cloud backup I never worry about data loss anymore. Synology is an appliance, FreeNAS was a pet, at this point in my life I don't have time for Pets.

hestefisk4• 7 years ago

Why is this a news story?

tczer2• 7 years ago

certainly because of recent Linus comments on ZFS

cpach2• 7 years ago

Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181

cpach2• 7 years ago

It’s not news per se. I upvoted since I’m interested in the discussion of various alternatives for storage (both for personal and business use).

It’s also interesting because of the current kerfuffle regarding the future of ZFS. For people who want to read up on that, this thread is quite interesting: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-...

tczer2• 7 years ago

For those looking for a linux based NAS distribution, you should also take a look at openmediavault here https://www.openmediavault.org/

It has been running on my home server for 5+ years now and it's a delight. It also supports ZFS through a plugin.

anon90013• 7 years ago

I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server.

FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably got a lot more value than I'm willing to admit, and I'm sure that's why it's popular, but I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly.

pmiller2• 7 years ago

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. JBOD is a totally valid strategy for a home disk array. Add in k parity drives and you can even recover from k total drive failures. RAID is not the end all be all of multi-disk storage.

gregmac• 7 years ago

I also looked at it a few years ago when I last rebuilt my media server, and ultimately decided the same.

I now run SnapRAID [1] with mergerfs [2] and for my use, it's got many benefits over zfs and normal raid setups:

I could start from my existing volumes, without having to move any files.

I can use my random bunch of varying size disks purchased over several years, and add as needed. I tend to buy a new drive every couple years at whatever cheapest $/GB is, which means usually each drive is 2x the size of the last one I bought.

If something catastrophic fails like the system itself, the disks are just normal independent ext4 volumes - I can read them from basically anything. I've had to recover a RAID5 array using replacement hardware before, it's not fun and not something I want to ever have to do at home.

[1] https://www.snapraid.it/

[2] https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs

anon90013• 7 years ago

I actually use RAID6 with mdadm, and it's also portable to different machines. I was kind of surprised the first time I moved the array to a new machine and it all just worked.

nickik• 7 years ago

I don't get this comment. You can use a cheap PC with ryzen and run samba on FreeNas.

It seems to me you are mixing up what 'FreeNas mini' and 'FreeNAS Freebsd-based OS'.

anon90013• 7 years ago

What I'm saying is that the cost of being on a non-standard distro is greater than the benefit the freenas UI provides. Even if you want to run RAID, it's one or two commands with mdadm. FreeBSD and ZFS makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.

thefz• 7 years ago

I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly

I set up a 6 drive FreeNAS box in an old gaming computer I had around, just for the purpose of learning how it works. And out of love for BSD, of course. Not everything has to undergo a cost/benefit analysis, some like to play.

detaro• 7 years ago

Most people probably don't setup RAID/other redundancy schemes often enough to be able to do it confidently in 5 minutes on the command line, so why not use something that makes it easier?

dang• 7 years ago

Previous threads for the curious:

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397

tdons• 7 years ago

Is there anyone here who prefers FreeNAS over vanilla FreeBSD+zfs and would like to share their experience?

I've been running FreeBSD with zfs for many years. I'm unsure if it was the right decision, but I did learn a lot and it's been extremely stable after the initial setup :-)

spants• 7 years ago

If you are looking for something like this, try unraid.net. you can run docker templates and plugins, easily add storage and has a friendly community.

throwaway77384• 7 years ago

not the same, as it isn't free :)

FreeNAS

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