Or you could save yourself $900 by pulling a $100 desktop off craigslist. Windows is better for this, anyway. Homegroup + Teamviewer for management is just too easy.
Quick check of the local craigslist implies that the buyer should indeed beware. Most "~$100 desktops" were Dells without support for more than 2 sata ports. Couldn't find any example of what the $100 server was, but strongly suspect it could handle 4 sata ports. Since most of these are Dells, check before assuming that you can simply cram a PCI-e card in to add ports (not to mention physically adding the drive).
The common inclusion of "windows 7 ultimate" on boxes that were absolutely cut rate to begin with doesn't inspire me with confidence either. Of course, I'd be going the Linux (or BSD if I really wanted that ZFS goodness), but I'd check the fine print before building a windows server (not that windows isn't amazing at serving local desktops/notebooks.)
Once you've carefully checked all the specs on your "$100 craigslist special", moving up to ZFS is what, $50 for 8G RAM (don't expect many of them to have open DIMM ports, hopefully all of them take DDR3). I suspect the real cost of all this is your time first, power consumed second, and finally the cost of the system (adding the cost of a simple server to your newegg hard drive order might be well over $200, I can't imagine the time issues making up the difference with the reviewed units. You can probably keep the power consumption down and make sure all your specs fit without dealing with clueless craigslist sellers. Of course, at this point windows has to justify its expense, but if you are only familiar with windows it is likely a no-brainer (you really don't want your first experience with Linux to be managing all your data, start with something a little less critical).
Not sure I'd go with a $100 Dell special off CL or eBay, but a more generic system would work well enough...
I bought a 8-port RAID SAS/SATA controller for $25 off of eBay (sold as "used" but the card was spotless). The only issue is case/power supply support at that point. Running your own Linux box, you can also run a LAMP stack and any software you might use personally, such as software to fetch files for you off of Usenet, for example.
You could also add another network card, add in external storage as needed... I manage my server with WebMin and keep it in my basement (I have to make Linux feel at home).
There are many of us here who could do that and setup configure and maintain but why should we when a NAS does it much easier and far less maintenance. Especially with an OS like Synolgoys that has many easy to install and configure packages.
HP microservers are often down to about £170 new, given that we pay VAT and our currency is now worthless, I imagine they are about the same in $.
One of those and either Windows or Linux seems a much better bet.
Linux gives you zfs, and Windows will do tiered storage spaces (although you need to do the config on a Windows Server trial, it then works on consumer OSes, and ReFS is pretty good.)
ZFS on Linux is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Oracle's law department (otherwise known as 99% of Oracle) is waiting for the best time to strike (probably when Red Hat includes it, which they won't do because of lawsuits. So it isn't as bad as it looks). In practice, this almost certainly means that your support disappears, not your data. But do you really want to copy all your data when this happens?
But if Oracle wanted it part of Linux they would GPL ZFS. ZFS+BSD is legally Solaris, so no problem. But this is the same company spent billions to fight google over the Java API, so don't expect them to go down without a fight.
Oracle released ZFS as CDDL. They cannot take it back, it has been developed further on the basis of that CDDL code. However no need to wait for linux/Redhat, since FreeBSD or OmniOS are already mature systems that have performant implementations of ZFS (technically, on illumos it's native).
But it'll be the Linux side doing the suing, not the ZFS/Oracle side. Including ZFS in Ubuntu isn't against the ZFS CDDL (IINAL, not legal advice etc.) Do you realistically see Linus (or others) suing Canonical?
What, WHY would the Linux side do the suing? The reason people say oracle might sue is because they (or sun) designed cddl to be incompatible with gpl (in a very particular way which relates to the idea of "copyright holders"), and, given that, and Oracle being somewhat litigious, there is a very understandable reluctance to properly include zfs into the kernel (as something other than a module, btw, since this has its own problems when it comes to system integration).
Gpl is all about DERIVED works and that's how it propagates, and that is how companies can get around the vital nature of it---they write their proprietary modules then very thin shims which they gpl. ZFS, in particular, has long included a fairly big abstraction called the Solaris Porting Layer which is what allows it to run across different kernels but in a very non-ideal way.
If you're going to roll your own, some type of microserver is the way to go. An old desktop off Craigslist isn't going to have ECC memory, and will burn enough Wattage that it'll cost about $50-$100 more per year to keep it powered on 24/7. I stopped counting the number of people I've had to talk out of turning their old desktop into a file server. Most did not realize that the extra electricity they'd pay for would exceed the cost of a dedicated low-power NAS/file server in a few years.
The big advantage of your approach is when something goes wrong. You can have another HP/Dell micro server on site the next day. Likewise the Dell equivalent. If a NAS goes wrong you will be without your data for days or weeks.
If you have a consumer NAS, and it just *dies* (IE PSU pops or similar 'fatal' error - yeah, i know, you can get replacement PSUs but bear with me here) most of them will allow you to buy another chassis of the same model, and just move the disks.
Or, if you used a bit of common sense, you can take the backup that you made - you did make a backup, yeah? - and just restore it to a new unit.
It's not *quite* as efficient as having a Microserver etc with NBD warranty, but if you are moderately cash rich (IE have a credit card you can drop a grand on without fussing too much) then it's entirely possible to do.
The other big, big bonus of these platforms is that if you're a small company that lacks serious IT chops, these devices give you stupid;y good featuresets with fairly straightforward setup.
Got a used quad CPU server and want to set up a test environment? You can have iSCSI set up on one of these units in minutes. Try that with a straight debian box, or even something like TrueNAS; your average IT generalist or hobbyist will be, er, a bit longer than that.
So it's horses for courses. I use a few Synos to run my companies backup strategy as they're plenty reliable enough, they fail over to each other nicely, and they're easy enough to use that if I get knocked down by a bus, using them doesn't require solid Linux/Windows server knowledge.
that said, my DS214 at home is getting a bit long in the tooth, and a large chassis, modest server-oriented mobo and a used Xeon and some ECC RAM is a tempting idea; I could then use the Syno as a backup target....
I have 3 microservers (36, 40, 54) and one Qnap (451). The price on all of these, upgraded to 8 or 16gb memory, second intel NIC added - not very far apart. (Got the Qnap on a sale for 330 for the base box). With the MSs, I can run solaris and ECC and get ZFS, but need to run VMs (Virtualbox) to have Linux sessions that have all of the useful media sharing stuff like plex, mediatomb, mt-daapd, etc. It also has a 5th sata connection (intended for optical) with the hacked bios, so I could add an SSD for L2ARC and/or ZIL. It's more work than it was worth for me to do this within the native Solaris parent, though I do like having current zfs.
The QNAP is smaller, quieter, takes less space, and will even allow the VM if I want it. I have a hard time recommending the DIY route for the 4 bay unit.
But if you want to go to the 8 drive class, the typical pricing for qnap or synology makes you look at a nice Fractal Design case and an i3 or Xeon proc. The pain point, if you wanted Oracle Solaris, was support for the GPU, the NIC, the chipset. I stuck with AMD chips a long time because Sandy Bridge support came slowly. This included freeNAS at the time.
There are $200-250 brand new Lenovo, HP or Dell microservers, deals on Newegg every other day. Another $80-100 retail price of Win 10, which can be legally obtained for less btw, gives you Storage Pools.
The biggest advantage of Win Storage Pools is the easy migration - if your system fails, you simply pull the HDD stack and plug in a new system - no down time, no data loss, zero effort. Besides, am not even adding all the network connection advantage that Win environment gives you, and the fully functional GUI OS taht can be used for anything else, besides serving data.
1. I assume for storage pools you need pro. Which is $200. 2. FreeNas and the like are free. 3. Why waste compute and Ram resources on a gui? 4. Windows is possibly the worst route for a Nas.
multichannel SMB3 is another huge advantage none of other offer options have. Everyone talks chaneel bonding, thinking it will give you multi gigabit path between a system and the server. only windows given you that today (unless you are willing to run experimental features in samba)
It's about convenience and security, not about upfront cost for the device. Paying for my Synology will probably give me ~5 years of OS and package updates, and several nice services that just work by ticking a checkbox. I'm managing Linux and FreeBSD boxes at work, among other things, and I don't want to do that with my home NAS.
....and that is exactly why I have a Syno. I've got two dozen Linux servers I look after at work all day (and out of hours). I don't want to be fucking about with SMB config files at home. I just want to listen to music, watch videos and run the odd VM off an iSCSI LUN without all the tedious messing about.
And once you've finished messing around with all of that it will have cost you $1000 in just time and effort. Then it fails a month later and you have to start again. Hence why I buy off the shelf NAS units for small business customers. 99% of them just want a place for file sharing and backups.
I disagree. You will then also need a Windows license and almost certainly a SATA/RAID controller card. Plus if the harware is old it might not support transcoding or encryption. You can get a 4-bay NAS that has all of this for less than $300.
You don't only bay for the hardware. You also pay for the software which makes it easy to setup and use and for the compact enclosure. Any desktop/tower with 4 bays is way, way bigger than these NAS units.
I say this because I'm looking into buying one. right Now I just use my main PC as "NAS" (shared folders).
FYI, you can ussually pick up a "off lease refurbished" PC for $60-$100 with 90 day warranty from Microcenter. ~3GHz dual core and 4GB of ram etc.
I've always known Windows soft RAID is kind of a joke, and i remember giving it a try many years ago just to see the BAD drive being took as the "good" drive and drop the accrual good drive causing as many problems as you can think. Which brings me to what I've been testing, a RAID10 setup with old 2.5" 500GB drives that are known bad drives using Windows 8/10 ReFS. I'm very surprised, VERY. I Copy a 7zip file (100GB) a few times every few weeks and test it. I've replaced two drives in the 4 drive setup in the 6 months i've been running it.
The RAID10 is used for 24/7 torrenting on my main rig with no ECC, so there is consistent read/writes going to it.
IDK, Sometimes you can find a $100 special on CL..... I recently purchased 3 Dell PowerEdge 2650 rack servers with 16gb ram each and 2TB in 15k SAS drives from a business that was upgrading and selling off their old servers. While they are not the latest and greatest, They work great with the PERC hardware raid controllers in them. Need more space, drives keep getting cheaper every day....... Just don't ask me about the electric bill running 3 rack servers in the house.., :-)
At $1k for the 4 bay base model iX Systems is operating in a much higher price bracket (ZFS's advanced features devour ram and ECC is strongly recommended so they need much more expensive hardware than the arm/low end intel chips on most of these) than the primarily consumer tier models being looked at here.
You should have titled this article "commercial NAS systems", not "commercial NAS operating systems ". Going by the title, unRAID (a comercial OS that you use on a standard x86 PC) should also be included in this.
It would be nice if Apple came out with one. The problem across all the one's presented is you have to be a geek just to understand the terminology let alone the concepts. Fine if that's the only group one wants to sell to. It would also be nice when Terra-byte SSDs come down in price to see a small form-factor NAS being built around them. Once again the current crop demands space, and in some cases lots of it.
Apple's solution would be 3x the price, work only with Apple devices, be feature locked and frustrating and require you to upgrade every 2 years, but would work well for a very limited use case.
FreeNAS just wipes the floor with all this crap, it's not even funny. Any so called "tech enthusiast" should be ashamed of buying this off the shelf stuff. And don't even start with the "it's more expensive" card when people are buying top end GPUs like there's no tomorrow. The matter of fact is that ZFS will save you from data corruption, everything else is just a joke.
"The same data protections" is not entirely correct. Although btrfs has room to support up to 256 bits of checksum for metadata and quite a bit more than that for the data, it currently uses CRC32C, which is a whole lot better than nothing, but is not great. And it's your only choice.
The default metadata checksum for ZFS (Fletcher2) is also "not great" but there are others to choose from and you can easily select SHA-256 as the default checksum on any ZFS filesystem, and this is automatically used if you enable deduplication because it requires it. Newer versions of ZFS also offer SHA-512, Skein, and Edon-R, so you have more data-integrity choices that range between ultimate cryptographic security and high performance.
I meant to say "data and metadata check for ZFS" above, because it does both by default. You can turn off data checksums in ZFS just as easily as you can change the checksum algorithm, but can never turn off metadata checksums. ZFS will also never store less than 2 copies of all metadata (optionally more), giving you built-in redundancy in that respect, even in single-disk setups. This is one of several reasons that ZFS doesn't have and doesn't need a "fsck" utility, because the filesystem integrity is baked in to the design.
Btrfs has actually supported sha256...TWICE. The first time was back during early btrfs development and then they removed it because of how slow it was. It was submitted in 2014 by a oracle dev but not merged because they want a general solution, and, potentially, much more flexibility (using the crypto API instead of having to maintain their implementations;per file hash algorithm (so, some files could use a stronger hash than others); different hash functions for data and metadata (metadata is limited to 256 while data doesn't really have a limit)) It's been percolating its way towards the kernel but it's not seen as a huge priority because: 1) there've been very few incidences of corrupt blocks passing ("crc32's error rate works out to one false positive per dozen megabytes *of random errors*--- that's a lot of errors, even talking into consideration CERN's data), 2) they already use sha256 for dedup (both in and out of band, though groundwork has been laid to make that pluggable as well).
ZFS is expensive and hard. Can't mix and match drives, RAM hog, to expand a vdev you need to upgrade all disks, needs ECC ram, keeps all disks spinning, will slow down as you near capacity.
The ZFS hype needs to stop. Its not at all suitable for a home user NAS, its meant for data centers.
Pfft. RAID is dead. Any decent array these days, is likely to get data corruption from hw raid.
ZFS is rock solid. Also, if for some reason your OS/COTS solution dies your data is at significant risk of death. ZFS datasets are kept locally and you can rebuild the dataset regardless of the hardware.
Ok. You got me, yes, it is uses an array of disks. Let me be more specific, RAID5 is a risk not worth taking. The reason they call it RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 is because they are significantly different to normal raid 5/6. Any RAID5 array that is over 12tb total size (not pool size) is at a very high risk of corruption as soon as a disk dies, its not conjecture - it is math. ZFS mitigates the risks inherent in a system designed decades ago, and is a far superior option for massive and small deployments.
ANY technology that uses multiple disks and incorporates some level of redundancy such that the ARRAY spread across MULTIPLE DISKS that can withstand the failure of 1 or more of those disks (you know, REDUNDANCY) IS a RAID array. Whether it's in software or hardware, whether they are fixed size stripes or variable sized (ZFS uses variable stripe sizes so it can optimize the size of the striping to each individual file) stripes, whether it uses stripes or separate ECC disks or complete mirrors, it is ALL a subset of the RAID paradigm.
ZFS RAIDz, 2z etc are RAID arrays. Their implementation of adaptive striping sizes per file is a significant enhancement over standard RAID5 and 6 and so on, but it is just that, an enhancement of, or more sophisticated implementation of, RAID.
Raid is dead. The big data center distributed filesystems have moved to erasure coding (pick your parity! Who says 3 is all you need?). In fact, I'd say zfs is sitting at a rather odd intersection of: not best used for your desktop and not the best option for data centers. Surely there's some market there but it's still a bit of an odd duck.
How is it expensive? Freenas is free. You don't need a ton of ram unless you are deduping (they don't seem to offer an out of band dedup, like btrfs, so they have to keep a hash table of all the blocks along with their locations, hence the origin of the rule of thumb "1GB/1TB"). It is, however, a ram hog (on Linux) in a slightly different way: whatever memory pages it claims, it owns and can't be reclaimed via the normal kernel methods (well, short of removing the module) unless it is on one of the solaris clones (it may not happen on the bsds as well, but I haven't really looked into the problem from their side). It doesn't NEED ECC much more than your laptop does (btw, your laptop actually does need ECC since that greatly improves system stability). That whole thing has been a bit misrepresented and is more about reducing your chances of false negatives (corruption) when deduping or compressing. I would, however, agree that it's overkill for your home server since it's quite complicated, needs tuning, and has a number of limitations you really need to be aware of. If you're going to roll your own I'd go with something like flexraid or snapraid (with my preference being snapraid due to it being extremely well developed, open source, great community and responsive developers---ganesh doesn't much like it because it's not a "live" raid (meaning it only backs up when you tell it to, hence, snapraid) but that's all most home users need---periodic backups), but the benefits are terrific: it hashes your data (and can scrub it so that silent corruption doesn't occur), you can add disks to the pool as you need them without a massive rebuild (in fact, it should just take up the disk and add it to the pool without much else, assuming the disk is empty), use it on whatever os (and with whatever fs) you want, supports parity levels that make zfs drool (up to 6, iirc), and, if something happens that causes one of your disks to become unrecoverable, the only data you lose is what was on that disk (no striping---this also means you don't get the faster read/writes that striping can offer but, unless you are using better than gigabit Ethernet you can't even make use of that speed).
You'd be better off comparing this stuff to OpenMediaVault. It's essentially a NAS stack that runs on top of Debian (you can get it as an installable distro or install it from Debian with apt). Pretty sure it does everything these commercial NAS OSes do and probably more. I'm running it on a little i3 6100 system at home it looks after all my home serving needs (torrents, plex, samba, openvpn, IP cam footage, virtualisation, crashplan cloud backup, webserver, mumble server, FTP server). 45w idle with 6 disks (spun up) and two SSDs in it.
I have an honest question to those promoting those FreeNas / DIY server. I am myself a DIY loudspeaker builder so I clearly know that what you pay for is not purely components but also all the development work behind. So a question to you (pwr4wrd, jbrizz, cdillon....), let's assume you are a normal person without good IT knowledge: * how long do you need to setup the NAS with a few users, folder access rights and services running compared to a Synology (for instance because this is what I have) that would require just a few minutes? * do you have mobile phone or tablet application to access in a friendly way your photos? Your videos? manage and launch downloads? control your camera? manage your emails on your server? manage your files remotely? share easily to friends files, photo albums with fine granular control? * do those systems support backup of cloud data to have incremental backup and recovery capabilities of your data in OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, DropBox...? * do those system can encode videos on the fly to decrease the bandwith necessary to have access to your video from remote places on your smartphones? * can you easily make cross-NAS incremental backup as my brother and father are also using a Synology NAS and we are making our off site backup in each other NAS? * does those OSs can act as iTunes server and TimeMachine destination?
Those are just a few examples of very simple, out of the box capabilities on the Synology and I would be genuinely interested to know how easy ALL those non exhaustive features work on FreeNAS or other solutions you are proposing...
good question, i would be interested in that as well. Maybe we can settle this issue that keeps cropping up on every NAS article. Honest answers appreciated.
If you can install Windows can you can install something like FreeNAS or OMV, so many people could use it (although not a "normal" person), but your need at the very least a willingness to tinker. I've never used FreeNAS, but OMV uses a plugin system from the WebUI to add extra things like Plex, webserver, OpenVPN server etc. which in theory should be easy to get working, but in practise it's far from it. For the average person who needs network storage, a prebuilt NAS is definitely the way to go.
The problem with a lot of the replies like yours is you are assuming NAS is just for network storage for most people when they do much more and are far easier to configure and run than roll your own.
And to better answer your questions, regarding OpenMediaVault: *a few minutes *a combination of OpenVPN and other apps would allow this, e.g. I use Remote Transmission GUI to start/monitor torrents so they are ready when I get home. My HikVision IP cameras have their own app which can be used when my phone is connected to my VPN. *Crashplan have a linux app which can be run headless without a graphical interface. This works well to backup 1.4TB of data for me. *Plex does this and miniDLNA (a DLNA plugin) can be configured to do this also. My i3 6100 has plenty of power to transcode 1080p on the fly. *Some disk arrangements support snapshots, although I don't use it so can't comment. Crashplan does incremental backups to the cloud which is (1 min, 15 min, 1 hour, 1 day etc, so very regular) works well for me. I have a gigabit fibre Internet connection to help support this. *I believe it does support TimeMachine and AFP with a plugin, not sure about iTunes or Apple TV.
Thanks for the honest question. It seems very cumbersome and with a mix of various inelegant solutions and I am still puzzled about people laughing at customer of those NAS system which are plug and play. Coming back to the few points I mentioned: * mobile app: is Remote Transmission an application existing on mobile phone? You spoke of Plex which is supposed to be great but was always much slower than Synology app for video and photo browsing. And Plex only stream MP3 music files even if I have FLAC. What about file management? * Cloud: a non graphical interface to setup backup with complicated file structure is really far from user friendly. What about support of cloud that people are using? Crashplan is for backup. I have Windows devices so I am using OneDrive like hundred of millions of users. Most used cloud storage are OneDrive, DropBox and GoogleDrive. What about this support on OpenMediaVault? * transcoding: good. Plex does a lot of thing but still not on par with proprietary solutions (see above). * Snapshots is not the same as "standard" backup. Again, I am not speaking of "backup" in proprietary cloud backup but cross-NAS. Crashplan needs to be paid, constantly, until the end of your life. When you have already a NAS, I do not see the need for that when I can do it freely across different NAS from my family. From your answer, I deduct that it is a no. Speaking of backup in the cloud, I have a cable connection with 25Mbps in upload which is more than 99% of the population. So it means on an average around 2.5Mo/s so for my 4To of backup, it is a 20 days upload backup!!! With a NAS, you can send the data with a HDD and just start the backup with the incremental part with the initial transfer of bulk data made physically. How do I do that with cloud services? * no support of iTunes or AppleTV is just a deal breaker for Apple users. Simply as that.
All in all, it confirms that it is 1/ much more complicated and 2/ much less capable. sure, it may be cheaper for the one that can configure and manage it and are fine with the limitations. But it is far from being an universal solution.
Not answering all the questions (I don't, for example, use cloud solutions for data backup or access - that's why I have NASes), so I don't use the cloud.
However with respect to table/phone apps and Transmission. Transmission is a bittorrent client. The client can run in a headless mode ideal for servers (e.g. NASes). You can also get applications that run on your local computer and on Android devices, whether tablet, phone, media-players or 'computer'.
But in the bigger picture, the 'app' for tablets and phones for Transmission and most of the other services you mentioned (photos, videos etc) is called "a browser". Most of these services (including transmission) offer, in addition to purpose-built apps, web browser enabled interfaces.
They are laughing at NAS because they are being silly and egotistical. Many of us here can roll our own but why deal with it when a NAS does so many things out of the box. I have enough work to do at work and don't need to do it at home. How valuable is your time?
Jbrizz has gone more in depth. But essentially the answer is yes. If you wanted to load up your has with all those things. You can. And more. And it uses a better file system. And it is dead easy to recover. And you can have bigger arrays easily.
Yes. That is why we always harp on about it. FreeNas is awesome.
- If you wanted to load up your has with all those things. You can. And more
See my answer above and re-read jbrizz answer that prove exactly otherwise. So it does less.
- And it uses a better file system
Synology are using Btrfs. What other "better file system" are you speaking about exactly?
- And it is dead easy to recover. And you can have bigger arrays easily
How "consumer" NAS are more complicated to recover? Those are standard RAID, standard file system. Also, bigger array like bigger than 48 disks and 480To of capacity?!? Which normal consumer needs more than nearly half PETABYTE, you tell me.
- That is why we always harp on about it. FreeNas is awesome.
Sure, it was is is about it. Those solution are CHEAP. That's all. They are more complicated, less capable, less elegant and bigger. The fact that it does not do ALL the simple points I mention show how limited they are already from the get go. And I am even not entering in more advanced features.
Many people I know have had qnap/synology Nas's die. The only way they could recover those drives is to buy the exact same hardware again. This was due to their implementations of raid in hardware. The array required the same HW controller to survive. ZFS is on the other hand, hardware agnostic.
My 5 disk array is in a mini-itx case. Plenty small enough for me. The setup takes about 5-10 mins like cots if you buy the hardware pre-built. It is not cheap, it is excellent value. It is also a full fledged home/soho/enterprise system and beyond.
Every feature you have mentioned is possible from FreeNas. So, it is feature complete. And it is open source So no worries about vendor disinterest in your particular version of hardware. And it is regularly updated, so that is not different either.
The fact is, if you have the smarts to set up COTS. You can set up freenas.
Again. It's just better. But each to their own I guess.
Well reading the comments here on the ressource hog and how it is almost impossible to extend the array, I would say that it is really a matter of opinion than facts. Important is not that but more all capabilities you lose with those DIY NAS.
- The only way they could recover those drives is to buy the exact same hardware again.
That is not true. And it has been proven several times, even here in Anandtech article. Beside, people would usually remain with the same brand to keep the same UI and experience, especially when you are using the best products in the market (QNAP and Synology).
- It is not cheap, it is excellent value. It is also a full fledged home/soho/enterprise system and beyond.
- Every feature you have mentioned is possible from FreeNas
No. It is not. Take again my points and you will see it is NOT.
- So no worries about vendor disinterest in your particular version of hardware
I have a DS412+. And it is running the latest DSM 6.2 beta version, not yet release, with ALL the features. So I have a 5 year old hardware that is running the next year software without any limitations. And you tell me that I will have a better support with FreeNAS than those 6 years I have currently? You did not make for a very compelling argument and should try better.
- Again. It's just better. But each to their own I guess
Why are you not able to explain why then? It does not make all the functions that consumer NAS like Synology (or QNAP) offers, it is not really cheaper, what advantages does it have? Can you give some facts?
One entertaining setup supported with FreeNAS is boot from USB flash drive. I'm using this in my own 15 TB (raw) setup. If the chassis were to die, I could pull the USB stick and 5x 3TB drives and plug them into any other vaguely compatible hardware and have not just my data, but my configuration instantly online. So at the moment it runs in a Dell DCS 6005 (custom D6100) chassis with 48 GB of RAM, I could throw it in a desktop and be back up and running in just the time for taking drives out of sleds. I am running a beta version of FreeNAS at the moment with a minor read cache issue which requires reboot about every 6 months (it fails to free RAM from stale read cache to fresh which slows performance a bit). On the upside, the slightly excessive amount of RAM makes XBMC's metadata read awfully fast.
I could not agree with you more. These systems are a joke to begin with. When you factor in how much they cost considering crummy hardware they cram in these things, it becomes a total circus act.
FreeNAS is fine for the hobbyist but time is money if you are in business. Buy off the shelf, arrive at the customer, 10 minutes to setup the QNAP and you are back on the road.
You don't seem to adress adding/upgrading disks after the fact, which is something that's rather important. I got a Synology because it let me add same-size disks to an existing array after a few weeks/months. I'd get something else if I could find something that let me add different-size disks to an array, again, weeks/months after the intitial array setup.
I've purchased a couple of these QNAP NAS for work (TS-853A & TS-853U-RP) and interestingly you can upgrade the size of the drives after you max out the RAID. You have to do a single drive swap, then rebuild, then swap the next drive, then rebuild, ect (until all drives are replaced). But it does work! So even if you run out of space (or plan your expansion) you can easily replace all drives in the RAID with larger drives, it just takes a few days to do it smoothly.
You should be able to do this with Synology too, I believe. Though I haven't done it with mine yet, I remember researching this because I put four disks in mine from the get go, and I wanted to know what to do if I needed more space.
I love my Synology too, by the way. It's great cause it didn't need any major undertaking to setup, like building a server out of old (or new) hardware and software. I'm not a networking wonderkid, but I know my way around tech toys, and I still think these and other brands are quite viable for those who just want simplicity.
Mind you, I'm only a home/power user, so I don't need ZFS and FreeNAS and the like. I have physical backups of my important data, and if a movie file stored on my NAS gets corrupted, well dang, I'll just have to replace the file! Gadzooks!
- You should be able to do this with Synology too, I believe
Did it. On my Synology DS412+, exactly the same way and worked flawlessly, albeit slowly as it took more than a day for each disk swap to have the rebuilt complete (moving from 2To to 4to drives on 4 bays).
For info, my father latest DS916+ supports Bfrs out of the box and the latest DSM6.2 (still in beta) is supporting correction of corrupted data (before, it was just detection of those).
Yeah the few times I've seen an explanation on how to do so and asked the opinion of people who knew ZFS well the response I always got was on the line of "well technically it could work but the random IO torture test that it would consist of is likely to kill your drives midway though leaving you with a busted array."
Dunno where the line between a likely risk and just offending the hyper paranoia that ZFS zealots all seem to have is, but it's been very off putting the times I've looked at it.
Synology allows different-sized disks to be added whenever you like. I had 4x2TB disks and later switched out 2 of the disks for 4TB versions (one at a time of course or it wouldn't work).
There are tons of used SuperMicro servers, 2/3/4U, on eBay. They come with 12-24 hotswap drives, ECC memory, and a cpu much faster than any NAS here. This is commercial grade data center equipment that's so much better than any consumer hardware. You can pick these up for <$400.
The only disadvantage is the noise and power consumption is not going to be same, but you can replace the power supply/fans, and some people even replace all the internals since the SM cases and backplane is worth it by itself. Install the OS of your choice and get goodies like IPMI etc too.
This is of course not comparable to a 4bay NAS really but those are too limiting anyway and grossly overpriced. If you just want 4 bays any pc will do.
- This is of course not comparable to a 4bay NAS really but those are too limiting anyway and grossly overpriced. If you just want 4 bays any pc will do.
And what would be advantage of the PC? Because a PC is not as small as a NAS, so cannot be put anywhere you want, needs to have a keyboard / screen to administrate. It needs to have a Windows Server licence which is not open to private person. And if going to Linux on the PC, you end up with the same kind of issues and questions I asked in page 3 which are that it just does NOT offer the same type of capabilities. It is maybe slighly cheaper (to be seen) but not as powerful or capable.
I get my servers WITH a Win Server license. Its not unheard of, from a well-known auction site.
With Windows its a breeze creating shares.
And having commercial-grade HP servers allows for hot swapping, RAM-based controllers with battery backup, lights-out access and other cool stuff.
But as mentioned above - power & noise are the real caveats. Don't underestimate this part - you'll need a rack mounting in the basement as you will be able to STAND hearing even a couple of these running 24/7, and the electric bills soon show a difference too.
Call me a noob, but in the end - I didn't like FreeNAS, however much I liked the idea. Upgrading is not as easy as they make it out to be - I was forced back to the command line (as a CCNP its something I'm well used to, but dislike) and then - sometimes is JUST DOESN'T WORK / UPGRADE. Those are just my real-world experiences, and I know some of you are happy. But for me, it is no thank you Sir.
I too will continue buying NAS boxes off the shelf, or adding shares on existing servers if policies allow.
Or you could just buy a lenovo ts440 intel e3-1245 with 8 drive bays and hardware raid for $420, there was a deal last year on this. Install win server 2k12 r2 and be done with it
Anywhere that sells high end software will sell the standard edition for about $700. I suspect for this use you could get away with a $400 essentials license.
But not the hardware. Let's be real for a minute and stop the bull..t.
A 2 bay NAS cost 250$. New. Can you tell me how much cost, NEW, a celeron processor, 1Go of RAM, the motherboard, the case, the alimentation, the fans... to built your own NAS hardware? What do you expect to win? 50$? Does it really worth it with all the loss of functionality? Seriously?
About $300 for a 5 bay implementation. Did it myself. With as I said earlier, the same feature set, A better zfs implementation... Etc etc. (see earlier posts)
It's not bulls**t. I am just spreading the word, because it is just that good.
If anything the zealotry is on the side of cots. We humble freenas folk are just trying to advise you that you can have an enterprise solution for the same cost as consumer cots that is as good if not better.
Unfortunately that sale ended last year. They start around $800 right now. Once you add up the cost of a server windows license, an 8 bay COTS NAS starts to look more attractive. Add in the hot-swap bays, small form factor, consumer appliance-level power consumption and noise level. A roll-your-own server sounds less appealing. Some of them even use (or can use) mid-range Intel processors.
Quite happy with my 2-bay QNAP NAS. It's much smaller and more power efficient than anything I could have built myself. RTRR is great and better than RAID IMO. The versioning works great, it's super fast to sync and it protects against corruption, accidental deletion, ransonware etc. I don't care if my media collection goes offline for a day or two while I get a new drive and restore. RAID is for when you already have a backup plan, and you absolutely need 24/7 access to your data, such as business critical applications.
Yeah I've been a QNAP user for years now. Small, quiet, low power and best of all all low effort. Sometimes people just feel they need to make a rod for their own back. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Ganesh, thanks much for your intended series of posts to provide insight into NAS devices for the layperson to understand. I am relatively new to NAS devices and find something to learn all the time. So, I find an article posted like this one to be quite helpful. I've been running a NAS for just about a year now. I run a Synology DS1515+ but recently acquired QNAP's TVS-682T which still is not placed into production yet. The QNAP allows for added primary functionality of DAS and iSCSI in addition to NAS. I hope in future overviews of NAS devices you might cover these alternative configurations, when to use them, what they are for, etc. DAS I have basic ideas about but have zilch on iSCSI. Thanks much
Choosing your NAS depends on what you're planning to do. There's no question that any low end PC today can be converted to handle simple File sharing. If your project has multiple purposes and interfacing requirements then you might need more enterprise like features.
I've done some pretty decent sized Vmware projects and SAN is your headless disk array group. At home I can replicate that with a good NAS appliance, sure it doesn't have some of the sexy tech out there like 10G or Fiber Channel but having enough drives to host your OS data and bonding multiple NIC through LACP is good enough throughput to have a decent size Vmware site in your house. You could do something like this with a built HyperV or standalone ESX box but you run the risk of having non-standard RAID and complexity to your storage. The goal is to simplify storage and decouple OS running system from their disk arrays that's why having dedicated NAS for scalability is important.
The market for network-attached storage units has expanded significantly over the last few years.HP microservers are often down to about £170 new, given that we pay VAT and our currency is now worthless, I imagine they are about the same in $.www.earnwayz.tk
The article refers to Samba as a "protocol" (e.g. it says "accessible using protocols such as Samba or NFS") but it is not: Samba is a particular implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol.
The article states "Apple users need to enable AFP", however since version 10.9 of macOS the default file sharing protocol is SMB (see: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204445). Macs also support NFS out of the box.
Correct and Synology at least supports this pretty well. This isn't a bad article but its pretty clear the author doesn't have extensive NAS/OS experience and did not research very well.
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DominionSeraph - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Or you could save yourself $900 by pulling a $100 desktop off craigslist. Windows is better for this, anyway. Homegroup + Teamviewer for management is just too easy.wumpus - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Quick check of the local craigslist implies that the buyer should indeed beware. Most "~$100 desktops" were Dells without support for more than 2 sata ports. Couldn't find any example of what the $100 server was, but strongly suspect it could handle 4 sata ports. Since most of these are Dells, check before assuming that you can simply cram a PCI-e card in to add ports (not to mention physically adding the drive).The common inclusion of "windows 7 ultimate" on boxes that were absolutely cut rate to begin with doesn't inspire me with confidence either. Of course, I'd be going the Linux (or BSD if I really wanted that ZFS goodness), but I'd check the fine print before building a windows server (not that windows isn't amazing at serving local desktops/notebooks.)
Once you've carefully checked all the specs on your "$100 craigslist special", moving up to ZFS is what, $50 for 8G RAM (don't expect many of them to have open DIMM ports, hopefully all of them take DDR3). I suspect the real cost of all this is your time first, power consumed second, and finally the cost of the system (adding the cost of a simple server to your newegg hard drive order might be well over $200, I can't imagine the time issues making up the difference with the reviewed units. You can probably keep the power consumption down and make sure all your specs fit without dealing with clueless craigslist sellers. Of course, at this point windows has to justify its expense, but if you are only familiar with windows it is likely a no-brainer (you really don't want your first experience with Linux to be managing all your data, start with something a little less critical).
BenJeremy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Not sure I'd go with a $100 Dell special off CL or eBay, but a more generic system would work well enough...I bought a 8-port RAID SAS/SATA controller for $25 off of eBay (sold as "used" but the card was spotless). The only issue is case/power supply support at that point.
Running your own Linux box, you can also run a LAMP stack and any software you might use personally, such as software to fetch files for you off of Usenet, for example.
You could also add another network card, add in external storage as needed... I manage my server with WebMin and keep it in my basement (I have to make Linux feel at home).
darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
There are many of us here who could do that and setup configure and maintain but why should we when a NAS does it much easier and far less maintenance. Especially with an OS like Synolgoys that has many easy to install and configure packages.rtho782 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
HP microservers are often down to about £170 new, given that we pay VAT and our currency is now worthless, I imagine they are about the same in $.One of those and either Windows or Linux seems a much better bet.
Linux gives you zfs, and Windows will do tiered storage spaces (although you need to do the config on a Windows Server trial, it then works on consumer OSes, and ReFS is pretty good.)
wumpus - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
ZFS on Linux is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Oracle's law department (otherwise known as 99% of Oracle) is waiting for the best time to strike (probably when Red Hat includes it, which they won't do because of lawsuits. So it isn't as bad as it looks). In practice, this almost certainly means that your support disappears, not your data. But do you really want to copy all your data when this happens?But if Oracle wanted it part of Linux they would GPL ZFS. ZFS+BSD is legally Solaris, so no problem. But this is the same company spent billions to fight google over the Java API, so don't expect them to go down without a fight.
buxe2quec - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Oracle released ZFS as CDDL. They cannot take it back, it has been developed further on the basis of that CDDL code. However no need to wait for linux/Redhat, since FreeBSD or OmniOS are already mature systems that have performant implementations of ZFS (technically, on illumos it's native).coder111 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yes, and CDDL is incompatible with GPL, it was explicitly designed to be so.So ZFS is fine for your personal use as you are not distributing software, you are just using it. Copyright law only applies to software distribution.
But if any Linux distribution were to ship Linux+ZFS, THAT is a lawsuit waiting to happen, as they DO distribute software.
TheWrongChristian - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
But it'll be the Linux side doing the suing, not the ZFS/Oracle side. Including ZFS in Ubuntu isn't against the ZFS CDDL (IINAL, not legal advice etc.) Do you realistically see Linus (or others) suing Canonical?tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
What, WHY would the Linux side do the suing?The reason people say oracle might sue is because they (or sun) designed cddl to be incompatible with gpl (in a very particular way which relates to the idea of "copyright holders"), and, given that, and Oracle being somewhat litigious, there is a very understandable reluctance to properly include zfs into the kernel (as something other than a module, btw, since this has its own problems when it comes to system integration).
https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux
Gpl is all about DERIVED works and that's how it propagates, and that is how companies can get around the vital nature of it---they write their proprietary modules then very thin shims which they gpl. ZFS, in particular, has long included a fairly big abstraction called the Solaris Porting Layer which is what allows it to run across different kernels but in a very non-ideal way.
ZeDestructor - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
Ubuntu shipped ZFS + Linux in April 2016. There was no lawsuit, although the FSF was more than happy to bitch about it.On top of that, LLNL and various other have been using ZFS on Linux for years now, with no issues. So calm your tit's, it'll be fine.
tuxRoller - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
Canonical is based in what country?What's that country's history of corporate litigation?
Besides, Canonical isn't exactly overflowing with assets.
Solandri - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
If you're going to roll your own, some type of microserver is the way to go. An old desktop off Craigslist isn't going to have ECC memory, and will burn enough Wattage that it'll cost about $50-$100 more per year to keep it powered on 24/7. I stopped counting the number of people I've had to talk out of turning their old desktop into a file server. Most did not realize that the extra electricity they'd pay for would exceed the cost of a dedicated low-power NAS/file server in a few years.DominionSeraph - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Anything Intel from Lynnfield on sips power. Pulling a DL380 G5 off ebay wouldn't be a good idea, but you can get Sandy i3's and i5's for nothing.BedfordTim - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
The big advantage of your approach is when something goes wrong. You can have another HP/Dell micro server on site the next day. Likewise the Dell equivalent. If a NAS goes wrong you will be without your data for days or weeks.Beany2013 - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
Eh, kinda sorta.If you have a consumer NAS, and it just *dies* (IE PSU pops or similar 'fatal' error - yeah, i know, you can get replacement PSUs but bear with me here) most of them will allow you to buy another chassis of the same model, and just move the disks.
Or, if you used a bit of common sense, you can take the backup that you made - you did make a backup, yeah? - and just restore it to a new unit.
It's not *quite* as efficient as having a Microserver etc with NBD warranty, but if you are moderately cash rich (IE have a credit card you can drop a grand on without fussing too much) then it's entirely possible to do.
The other big, big bonus of these platforms is that if you're a small company that lacks serious IT chops, these devices give you stupid;y good featuresets with fairly straightforward setup.
Got a used quad CPU server and want to set up a test environment? You can have iSCSI set up on one of these units in minutes. Try that with a straight debian box, or even something like TrueNAS; your average IT generalist or hobbyist will be, er, a bit longer than that.
So it's horses for courses. I use a few Synos to run my companies backup strategy as they're plenty reliable enough, they fail over to each other nicely, and they're easy enough to use that if I get knocked down by a bus, using them doesn't require solid Linux/Windows server knowledge.
that said, my DS214 at home is getting a bit long in the tooth, and a large chassis, modest server-oriented mobo and a used Xeon and some ECC RAM is a tempting idea; I could then use the Syno as a backup target....
bsd228 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have 3 microservers (36, 40, 54) and one Qnap (451). The price on all of these, upgraded to 8 or 16gb memory, second intel NIC added - not very far apart. (Got the Qnap on a sale for 330 for the base box). With the MSs, I can run solaris and ECC and get ZFS, but need to run VMs (Virtualbox) to have Linux sessions that have all of the useful media sharing stuff like plex, mediatomb, mt-daapd, etc. It also has a 5th sata connection (intended for optical) with the hacked bios, so I could add an SSD for L2ARC and/or ZIL. It's more work than it was worth for me to do this within the native Solaris parent, though I do like having current zfs.The QNAP is smaller, quieter, takes less space, and will even allow the VM if I want it. I have a hard time recommending the DIY route for the 4 bay unit.
But if you want to go to the 8 drive class, the typical pricing for qnap or synology makes you look at a nice Fractal Design case and an i3 or Xeon proc. The pain point, if you wanted Oracle Solaris, was support for the GPU, the NIC, the chipset. I stuck with AMD chips a long time because Sandy Bridge support came slowly. This included freeNAS at the time.
Ananke - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
There are $200-250 brand new Lenovo, HP or Dell microservers, deals on Newegg every other day. Another $80-100 retail price of Win 10, which can be legally obtained for less btw, gives you Storage Pools.The biggest advantage of Win Storage Pools is the easy migration - if your system fails, you simply pull the HDD stack and plug in a new system - no down time, no data loss, zero effort.
Besides, am not even adding all the network connection advantage that Win environment gives you, and the fully functional GUI OS taht can be used for anything else, besides serving data.
doggface - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
1. I assume for storage pools you need pro. Which is $200.2. FreeNas and the like are free.
3. Why waste compute and Ram resources on a gui?
4. Windows is possibly the worst route for a Nas.
mervincm - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
multichannel SMB3 is another huge advantage none of other offer options have. Everyone talks chaneel bonding, thinking it will give you multi gigabit path between a system and the server. only windows given you that today (unless you are willing to run experimental features in samba)ZeDestructor - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
Samba 4.5 (at least) supports multichannel SMB.In terms of performance, the last performance boost Samba doesn't have that Windows SMB has is RDMA, and that's being worked on.
ZeDestructor - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
Samba 4.5+ provides non-experimental multichannel SMBOreoCookie - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
It's about convenience and security, not about upfront cost for the device. Paying for my Synology will probably give me ~5 years of OS and package updates, and several nice services that just work by ticking a checkbox. I'm managing Linux and FreeBSD boxes at work, among other things, and I don't want to do that with my home NAS.Beany2013 - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
....and that is exactly why I have a Syno. I've got two dozen Linux servers I look after at work all day (and out of hours). I don't want to be fucking about with SMB config files at home. I just want to listen to music, watch videos and run the odd VM off an iSCSI LUN without all the tedious messing about.jabber - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
And once you've finished messing around with all of that it will have cost you $1000 in just time and effort. Then it fails a month later and you have to start again. Hence why I buy off the shelf NAS units for small business customers. 99% of them just want a place for file sharing and backups.beginner99 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I disagree. You will then also need a Windows license and almost certainly a SATA/RAID controller card. Plus if the harware is old it might not support transcoding or encryption. You can get a 4-bay NAS that has all of this for less than $300.You don't only bay for the hardware. You also pay for the software which makes it easy to setup and use and for the compact enclosure. Any desktop/tower with 4 bays is way, way bigger than these NAS units.
I say this because I'm looking into buying one. right Now I just use my main PC as "NAS" (shared folders).
NeatOman - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
FYI, you can ussually pick up a "off lease refurbished" PC for $60-$100 with 90 day warranty from Microcenter. ~3GHz dual core and 4GB of ram etc.I've always known Windows soft RAID is kind of a joke, and i remember giving it a try many years ago just to see the BAD drive being took as the "good" drive and drop the accrual good drive causing as many problems as you can think. Which brings me to what I've been testing, a RAID10 setup with old 2.5" 500GB drives that are known bad drives using Windows 8/10 ReFS. I'm very surprised, VERY. I Copy a 7zip file (100GB) a few times every few weeks and test it. I've replaced two drives in the 4 drive setup in the 6 months i've been running it.
The RAID10 is used for 24/7 torrenting on my main rig with no ECC, so there is consistent read/writes going to it.
SnowleopardPC - Saturday, November 26, 2016 - link
IDK, Sometimes you can find a $100 special on CL..... I recently purchased 3 Dell PowerEdge 2650 rack servers with 16gb ram each and 2TB in 15k SAS drives from a business that was upgrading and selling off their old servers. While they are not the latest and greatest, They work great with the PERC hardware raid controllers in them. Need more space, drives keep getting cheaper every day....... Just don't ask me about the electric bill running 3 rack servers in the house.., :-)SnowleopardPC - Saturday, November 26, 2016 - link
Oh..... and I paid $75 for all 3. That was a deal.darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
If you read this article you would be aware of the many advantages of a NAS over a PC.driscoll42 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Any possibility of looking at homebuilt NAS solutions, such as using FreeNAS?Ninhalem - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
iX Systems sells COTS FreeNAS systems. I would have liked one of those included here in this comparison.DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
At $1k for the 4 bay base model iX Systems is operating in a much higher price bracket (ZFS's advanced features devour ram and ECC is strongly recommended so they need much more expensive hardware than the arm/low end intel chips on most of these) than the primarily consumer tier models being looked at here.nagi603 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
You should have titled this article "commercial NAS systems", not "commercial NAS operating systems ". Going by the title, unRAID (a comercial OS that you use on a standard x86 PC) should also be included in this.Threska - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
It would be nice if Apple came out with one. The problem across all the one's presented is you have to be a geek just to understand the terminology let alone the concepts. Fine if that's the only group one wants to sell to. It would also be nice when Terra-byte SSDs come down in price to see a small form-factor NAS being built around them. Once again the current crop demands space, and in some cases lots of it.dave_the_nerd - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Apple makes the Time Capsule.MrCrispy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Apple's solution would be 3x the price, work only with Apple devices, be feature locked and frustrating and require you to upgrade every 2 years, but would work well for a very limited use case.cen - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
FreeNAS just wipes the floor with all this crap, it's not even funny. Any so called "tech enthusiast" should be ashamed of buying this off the shelf stuff. And don't even start with the "it's more expensive" card when people are buying top end GPUs like there's no tomorrow. The matter of fact is that ZFS will save you from data corruption, everything else is just a joke.Solidstate89 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
btrfs is designed to offer the same data protections as ZFS. If that's your only reason for using FreeNAS it's a piss poor one.cdillon - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
"The same data protections" is not entirely correct. Although btrfs has room to support up to 256 bits of checksum for metadata and quite a bit more than that for the data, it currently uses CRC32C, which is a whole lot better than nothing, but is not great. And it's your only choice.The default metadata checksum for ZFS (Fletcher2) is also "not great" but there are others to choose from and you can easily select SHA-256 as the default checksum on any ZFS filesystem, and this is automatically used if you enable deduplication because it requires it. Newer versions of ZFS also offer SHA-512, Skein, and Edon-R, so you have more data-integrity choices that range between ultimate cryptographic security and high performance.
cdillon - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I meant to say "data and metadata check for ZFS" above, because it does both by default. You can turn off data checksums in ZFS just as easily as you can change the checksum algorithm, but can never turn off metadata checksums. ZFS will also never store less than 2 copies of all metadata (optionally more), giving you built-in redundancy in that respect, even in single-disk setups. This is one of several reasons that ZFS doesn't have and doesn't need a "fsck" utility, because the filesystem integrity is baked in to the design.tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Btrfs has actually supported sha256...TWICE. The first time was back during early btrfs development and then they removed it because of how slow it was. It was submitted in 2014 by a oracle dev but not merged because they want a general solution, and, potentially, much more flexibility (using the crypto API instead of having to maintain their implementations;per file hash algorithm (so, some files could use a stronger hash than others); different hash functions for data and metadata (metadata is limited to 256 while data doesn't really have a limit))It's been percolating its way towards the kernel but it's not seen as a huge priority because: 1) there've been very few incidences of corrupt blocks passing ("crc32's error rate works out to one false positive per dozen megabytes *of random errors*--- that's a lot of errors, even talking into consideration CERN's data), 2) they already use sha256 for dedup (both in and out of band, though groundwork has been laid to make that pluggable as well).
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ghostbit - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Nah. I am very happy with the Web interface and iOS apps Synology offers along with a sleek and small low-power chassis.But I guess I should also be ashamed I am not running a desktop with pfSense as a router as well?
dave_the_nerd - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Aside from the pfsense / FreeNAS issue - if you're using old desktop hardware as a server, yes, you should be ashamed. :-PIf you are using a prebuilt distro like FreeNAS instead of rolling your own distro, you should also be ashamed. Or something.
MrCrispy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
ZFS is expensive and hard. Can't mix and match drives, RAM hog, to expand a vdev you need to upgrade all disks, needs ECC ram, keeps all disks spinning, will slow down as you near capacity.The ZFS hype needs to stop. Its not at all suitable for a home user NAS, its meant for data centers.
bsd228 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
some of us don't see a difference, Crispy. I value my data as much as my datacenters' data.doggface - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Pfft. RAID is dead. Any decent array these days, is likely to get data corruption from hw raid.ZFS is rock solid. Also, if for some reason your OS/COTS solution dies your data is at significant risk of death. ZFS datasets are kept locally and you can rebuild the dataset regardless of the hardware.
eldakka - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
RAID is dead? Huh?Sure, you can use ZFS without RAID, but that doesn't give you any hardware failure data protection.
I've rarely seen someone not use ZFS in some sort of RAID arrangement:
ZFS RAIDZ = RAID5
ZFS RAIDZ2 = RAID6
Software RAID (ZFS RAIDZ, RAIDZ2 and others) is still RAID.
doggface - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Ok. You got me, yes, it is uses an array of disks. Let me be more specific, RAID5 is a risk not worth taking. The reason they call it RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 is because they are significantly different to normal raid 5/6. Any RAID5 array that is over 12tb total size (not pool size) is at a very high risk of corruption as soon as a disk dies, its not conjecture - it is math. ZFS mitigates the risks inherent in a system designed decades ago, and is a far superior option for massive and small deployments.eldakka - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
OK, then let me be more clear.RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
ANY technology that uses multiple disks and incorporates some level of redundancy such that the ARRAY spread across MULTIPLE DISKS that can withstand the failure of 1 or more of those disks (you know, REDUNDANCY) IS a RAID array. Whether it's in software or hardware, whether they are fixed size stripes or variable sized (ZFS uses variable stripe sizes so it can optimize the size of the striping to each individual file) stripes, whether it uses stripes or separate ECC disks or complete mirrors, it is ALL a subset of the RAID paradigm.
ZFS RAIDz, 2z etc are RAID arrays. Their implementation of adaptive striping sizes per file is a significant enhancement over standard RAID5 and 6 and so on, but it is just that, an enhancement of, or more sophisticated implementation of, RAID.
tuxRoller - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Raid is dead. The big data center distributed filesystems have moved to erasure coding (pick your parity! Who says 3 is all you need?).In fact, I'd say zfs is sitting at a rather odd intersection of: not best used for your desktop and not the best option for data centers. Surely there's some market there but it's still a bit of an odd duck.
tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
How is it expensive? Freenas is free.You don't need a ton of ram unless you are deduping (they don't seem to offer an out of band dedup, like btrfs, so they have to keep a hash table of all the blocks along with their locations, hence the origin of the rule of thumb "1GB/1TB").
It is, however, a ram hog (on Linux) in a slightly different way: whatever memory pages it claims, it owns and can't be reclaimed via the normal kernel methods (well, short of removing the module) unless it is on one of the solaris clones (it may not happen on the bsds as well, but I haven't really looked into the problem from their side).
It doesn't NEED ECC much more than your laptop does (btw, your laptop actually does need ECC since that greatly improves system stability). That whole thing has been a bit misrepresented and is more about reducing your chances of false negatives (corruption) when deduping or compressing.
I would, however, agree that it's overkill for your home server since it's quite complicated, needs tuning, and has a number of limitations you really need to be aware of.
If you're going to roll your own I'd go with something like flexraid or snapraid (with my preference being snapraid due to it being extremely well developed, open source, great community and responsive developers---ganesh doesn't much like it because it's not a "live" raid (meaning it only backs up when you tell it to, hence, snapraid) but that's all most home users need---periodic backups), but the benefits are terrific: it hashes your data (and can scrub it so that silent corruption doesn't occur), you can add disks to the pool as you need them without a massive rebuild (in fact, it should just take up the disk and add it to the pool without much else, assuming the disk is empty), use it on whatever os (and with whatever fs) you want, supports parity levels that make zfs drool (up to 6, iirc), and, if something happens that causes one of your disks to become unrecoverable, the only data you lose is what was on that disk (no striping---this also means you don't get the faster read/writes that striping can offer but, unless you are using better than gigabit Ethernet you can't even make use of that speed).
jbrizz - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
You'd be better off comparing this stuff to OpenMediaVault. It's essentially a NAS stack that runs on top of Debian (you can get it as an installable distro or install it from Debian with apt). Pretty sure it does everything these commercial NAS OSes do and probably more. I'm running it on a little i3 6100 system at home it looks after all my home serving needs (torrents, plex, samba, openvpn, IP cam footage, virtualisation, crashplan cloud backup, webserver, mumble server, FTP server). 45w idle with 6 disks (spun up) and two SSDs in it.jlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have an honest question to those promoting those FreeNas / DIY server. I am myself a DIY loudspeaker builder so I clearly know that what you pay for is not purely components but also all the development work behind.So a question to you (pwr4wrd, jbrizz, cdillon....), let's assume you are a normal person without good IT knowledge:
* how long do you need to setup the NAS with a few users, folder access rights and services running compared to a Synology (for instance because this is what I have) that would require just a few minutes?
* do you have mobile phone or tablet application to access in a friendly way your photos? Your videos? manage and launch downloads? control your camera? manage your emails on your server? manage your files remotely? share easily to friends files, photo albums with fine granular control?
* do those systems support backup of cloud data to have incremental backup and recovery capabilities of your data in OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, DropBox...?
* do those system can encode videos on the fly to decrease the bandwith necessary to have access to your video from remote places on your smartphones?
* can you easily make cross-NAS incremental backup as my brother and father are also using a Synology NAS and we are making our off site backup in each other NAS?
* does those OSs can act as iTunes server and TimeMachine destination?
Those are just a few examples of very simple, out of the box capabilities on the Synology and I would be genuinely interested to know how easy ALL those non exhaustive features work on FreeNAS or other solutions you are proposing...
maximumGPU - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
good question, i would be interested in that as well. Maybe we can settle this issue that keeps cropping up on every NAS article. Honest answers appreciated.jbrizz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
If you can install Windows can you can install something like FreeNAS or OMV, so many people could use it (although not a "normal" person), but your need at the very least a willingness to tinker. I've never used FreeNAS, but OMV uses a plugin system from the WebUI to add extra things like Plex, webserver, OpenVPN server etc. which in theory should be easy to get working, but in practise it's far from it. For the average person who needs network storage, a prebuilt NAS is definitely the way to go.darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
The problem with a lot of the replies like yours is you are assuming NAS is just for network storage for most people when they do much more and are far easier to configure and run than roll your own.jbrizz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
And to better answer your questions, regarding OpenMediaVault:*a few minutes
*a combination of OpenVPN and other apps would allow this, e.g. I use Remote Transmission GUI to start/monitor torrents so they are ready when I get home. My HikVision IP cameras have their own app which can be used when my phone is connected to my VPN.
*Crashplan have a linux app which can be run headless without a graphical interface. This works well to backup 1.4TB of data for me.
*Plex does this and miniDLNA (a DLNA plugin) can be configured to do this also. My i3 6100 has plenty of power to transcode 1080p on the fly.
*Some disk arrangements support snapshots, although I don't use it so can't comment. Crashplan does incremental backups to the cloud which is (1 min, 15 min, 1 hour, 1 day etc, so very regular) works well for me. I have a gigabit fibre Internet connection to help support this.
*I believe it does support TimeMachine and AFP with a plugin, not sure about iTunes or Apple TV.
jlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Thanks for the honest question. It seems very cumbersome and with a mix of various inelegant solutions and I am still puzzled about people laughing at customer of those NAS system which are plug and play.Coming back to the few points I mentioned:
* mobile app: is Remote Transmission an application existing on mobile phone? You spoke of Plex which is supposed to be great but was always much slower than Synology app for video and photo browsing. And Plex only stream MP3 music files even if I have FLAC. What about file management?
* Cloud: a non graphical interface to setup backup with complicated file structure is really far from user friendly. What about support of cloud that people are using? Crashplan is for backup. I have Windows devices so I am using OneDrive like hundred of millions of users. Most used cloud storage are OneDrive, DropBox and GoogleDrive. What about this support on OpenMediaVault?
* transcoding: good. Plex does a lot of thing but still not on par with proprietary solutions (see above).
* Snapshots is not the same as "standard" backup. Again, I am not speaking of "backup" in proprietary cloud backup but cross-NAS. Crashplan needs to be paid, constantly, until the end of your life. When you have already a NAS, I do not see the need for that when I can do it freely across different NAS from my family. From your answer, I deduct that it is a no. Speaking of backup in the cloud, I have a cable connection with 25Mbps in upload which is more than 99% of the population. So it means on an average around 2.5Mo/s so for my 4To of backup, it is a 20 days upload backup!!! With a NAS, you can send the data with a HDD and just start the backup with the incremental part with the initial transfer of bulk data made physically. How do I do that with cloud services?
* no support of iTunes or AppleTV is just a deal breaker for Apple users. Simply as that.
All in all, it confirms that it is 1/ much more complicated and 2/ much less capable. sure, it may be cheaper for the one that can configure and manage it and are fine with the limitations. But it is far from being an universal solution.
eldakka - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
Not answering all the questions (I don't, for example, use cloud solutions for data backup or access - that's why I have NASes), so I don't use the cloud.However with respect to table/phone apps and Transmission. Transmission is a bittorrent client. The client can run in a headless mode ideal for servers (e.g. NASes). You can also get applications that run on your local computer and on Android devices, whether tablet, phone, media-players or 'computer'.
But in the bigger picture, the 'app' for tablets and phones for Transmission and most of the other services you mentioned (photos, videos etc) is called "a browser". Most of these services (including transmission) offer, in addition to purpose-built apps, web browser enabled interfaces.
darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Browser is not the answer in many many cases. Which you know but want to sound clever like you know something others don't.darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
They are laughing at NAS because they are being silly and egotistical.Many of us here can roll our own but why deal with it when a NAS does so many things out of the box. I have enough work to do at work and don't need to do it at home.
How valuable is your time?
doggface - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Jbrizz has gone more in depth. But essentially the answer is yes. If you wanted to load up your has with all those things. You can. And more. And it uses a better file system. And it is dead easy to recover. And you can have bigger arrays easily.Yes. That is why we always harp on about it. FreeNas is awesome.
jlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
- If you wanted to load up your has with all those things. You can. And moreSee my answer above and re-read jbrizz answer that prove exactly otherwise.
So it does less.
- And it uses a better file system
Synology are using Btrfs. What other "better file system" are you speaking about exactly?
- And it is dead easy to recover. And you can have bigger arrays easily
How "consumer" NAS are more complicated to recover? Those are standard RAID, standard file system. Also, bigger array like bigger than 48 disks and 480To of capacity?!?
Which normal consumer needs more than nearly half PETABYTE, you tell me.
- That is why we always harp on about it. FreeNas is awesome.
Sure, it was is is about it. Those solution are CHEAP. That's all.
They are more complicated, less capable, less elegant and bigger.
The fact that it does not do ALL the simple points I mention show how limited they are already from the get go. And I am even not entering in more advanced features.
doggface - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Btrfs < ZFS.Many people I know have had qnap/synology Nas's die. The only way they could recover those drives is to buy the exact same hardware again. This was due to their implementations of raid in hardware. The array required the same HW controller to survive. ZFS is on the other hand, hardware agnostic.
My 5 disk array is in a mini-itx case. Plenty small enough for me. The setup takes about 5-10 mins like cots if you buy the hardware pre-built.
It is not cheap, it is excellent value. It is also a full fledged home/soho/enterprise system and beyond.
Every feature you have mentioned is possible from FreeNas. So, it is feature complete. And it is open source So no worries about vendor disinterest in your particular version of hardware. And it is regularly updated, so that is not different either.
The fact is, if you have the smarts to set up COTS. You can set up freenas.
Again. It's just better. But each to their own I guess.
jlabelle2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
- Btrfs < ZFS.Well reading the comments here on the ressource hog and how it is almost impossible to extend the array, I would say that it is really a matter of opinion than facts. Important is not that but more all capabilities you lose with those DIY NAS.
- The only way they could recover those drives is to buy the exact same hardware again.
That is not true. And it has been proven several times, even here in Anandtech article. Beside, people would usually remain with the same brand to keep the same UI and experience, especially when you are using the best products in the market (QNAP and Synology).
- It is not cheap, it is excellent value. It is also a full fledged home/soho/enterprise system and beyond.
- Every feature you have mentioned is possible from FreeNas
No. It is not. Take again my points and you will see it is NOT.
- So no worries about vendor disinterest in your particular version of hardware
I have a DS412+. And it is running the latest DSM 6.2 beta version, not yet release, with ALL the features. So I have a 5 year old hardware that is running the next year software without any limitations.
And you tell me that I will have a better support with FreeNAS than those 6 years I have currently? You did not make for a very compelling argument and should try better.
- Again. It's just better. But each to their own I guess
Why are you not able to explain why then? It does not make all the functions that consumer NAS like Synology (or QNAP) offers, it is not really cheaper, what advantages does it have? Can you give some facts?
aaronb1138 - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
One entertaining setup supported with FreeNAS is boot from USB flash drive. I'm using this in my own 15 TB (raw) setup. If the chassis were to die, I could pull the USB stick and 5x 3TB drives and plug them into any other vaguely compatible hardware and have not just my data, but my configuration instantly online. So at the moment it runs in a Dell DCS 6005 (custom D6100) chassis with 48 GB of RAM, I could throw it in a desktop and be back up and running in just the time for taking drives out of sleds. I am running a beta version of FreeNAS at the moment with a minor read cache issue which requires reboot about every 6 months (it fails to free RAM from stale read cache to fresh which slows performance a bit). On the upside, the slightly excessive amount of RAM makes XBMC's metadata read awfully fast.pwr4wrd - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I could not agree with you more. These systems are a joke to begin with. When you factor in how much they cost considering crummy hardware they cram in these things, it becomes a total circus act.jabber - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
FreeNAS is fine for the hobbyist but time is money if you are in business. Buy off the shelf, arrive at the customer, 10 minutes to setup the QNAP and you are back on the road.StormyParis - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
You don't seem to adress adding/upgrading disks after the fact, which is something that's rather important.I got a Synology because it let me add same-size disks to an existing array after a few weeks/months.
I'd get something else if I could find something that let me add different-size disks to an array, again, weeks/months after the intitial array setup.
UpSpin - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
If I understand correctly QNAP offers this:Online RAID Level Migration and RAID Capacity Upgrade
https://www.qnap.com/en/tutorial/con_show.php?op=s...
igot1forya - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I've purchased a couple of these QNAP NAS for work (TS-853A & TS-853U-RP) and interestingly you can upgrade the size of the drives after you max out the RAID. You have to do a single drive swap, then rebuild, then swap the next drive, then rebuild, ect (until all drives are replaced). But it does work! So even if you run out of space (or plan your expansion) you can easily replace all drives in the RAID with larger drives, it just takes a few days to do it smoothly.bJammin - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
You should be able to do this with Synology too, I believe. Though I haven't done it with mine yet, I remember researching this because I put four disks in mine from the get go, and I wanted to know what to do if I needed more space.I love my Synology too, by the way. It's great cause it didn't need any major undertaking to setup, like building a server out of old (or new) hardware and software. I'm not a networking wonderkid, but I know my way around tech toys, and I still think these and other brands are quite viable for those who just want simplicity.
Mind you, I'm only a home/power user, so I don't need ZFS and FreeNAS and the like. I have physical backups of my important data, and if a movie file stored on my NAS gets corrupted, well dang, I'll just have to replace the file! Gadzooks!
jlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
- You should be able to do this with Synology too, I believeDid it. On my Synology DS412+, exactly the same way and worked flawlessly, albeit slowly as it took more than a day for each disk swap to have the rebuilt complete (moving from 2To to 4to drives on 4 bays).
For info, my father latest DS916+ supports Bfrs out of the box and the latest DSM6.2 (still in beta) is supporting correction of corrupted data (before, it was just detection of those).
dave_the_nerd - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Yeah, ZFS doesn't make expanding an array very easy.DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Yeah the few times I've seen an explanation on how to do so and asked the opinion of people who knew ZFS well the response I always got was on the line of "well technically it could work but the random IO torture test that it would consist of is likely to kill your drives midway though leaving you with a busted array."Dunno where the line between a likely risk and just offending the hyper paranoia that ZFS zealots all seem to have is, but it's been very off putting the times I've looked at it.
BugblatterIII - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Synology allows different-sized disks to be added whenever you like. I had 4x2TB disks and later switched out 2 of the disks for 4TB versions (one at a time of course or it wouldn't work).Here's a calculator that tells you how much extra space you get for a given configuration: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/support/RAID_calcul...
OreoCookie - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Anandtech, this is a great idea for an article, exactly why I come here every day! Thanks!MrCrispy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
There are tons of used SuperMicro servers, 2/3/4U, on eBay. They come with 12-24 hotswap drives, ECC memory, and a cpu much faster than any NAS here. This is commercial grade data center equipment that's so much better than any consumer hardware. You can pick these up for <$400.The only disadvantage is the noise and power consumption is not going to be same, but you can replace the power supply/fans, and some people even replace all the internals since the SM cases and backplane is worth it by itself. Install the OS of your choice and get goodies like IPMI etc too.
This is of course not comparable to a 4bay NAS really but those are too limiting anyway and grossly overpriced. If you just want 4 bays any pc will do.
jlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
- This is of course not comparable to a 4bay NAS really but those are too limiting anyway and grossly overpriced. If you just want 4 bays any pc will do.And what would be advantage of the PC? Because a PC is not as small as a NAS, so cannot be put anywhere you want, needs to have a keyboard / screen to administrate. It needs to have a Windows Server licence which is not open to private person.
And if going to Linux on the PC, you end up with the same kind of issues and questions I asked in page 3 which are that it just does NOT offer the same type of capabilities. It is maybe slighly cheaper (to be seen) but not as powerful or capable.
Namisecond - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Don't forget the hot-swap bays. A regular PC wouldn't have them and they can get rather pricey.MrCrispy - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yes a commercial NAS has some advantages of course. But the price is too high.You don't need a server license, any Windows version, even Home is fine, there are plenty of remote control options.
Notmyusualid - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
I get my servers WITH a Win Server license. Its not unheard of, from a well-known auction site.With Windows its a breeze creating shares.
And having commercial-grade HP servers allows for hot swapping, RAM-based controllers with battery backup, lights-out access and other cool stuff.
But as mentioned above - power & noise are the real caveats. Don't underestimate this part - you'll need a rack mounting in the basement as you will be able to STAND hearing even a couple of these running 24/7, and the electric bills soon show a difference too.
Call me a noob, but in the end - I didn't like FreeNAS, however much I liked the idea. Upgrading is not as easy as they make it out to be - I was forced back to the command line (as a CCNP its something I'm well used to, but dislike) and then - sometimes is JUST DOESN'T WORK / UPGRADE. Those are just my real-world experiences, and I know some of you are happy. But for me, it is no thank you Sir.
I too will continue buying NAS boxes off the shelf, or adding shares on existing servers if policies allow.
edlee - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Or you could just buy a lenovo ts440 intel e3-1245 with 8 drive bays and hardware raid for $420, there was a deal last year on this. Install win server 2k12 r2 and be done with itjlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
- Install win server 2k12 r2 and be done with itHow do you do that? As a single private person? Could you point me the link where I can buy it?
DanNeely - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Anywhere that sells high end software will sell the standard edition for about $700. I suspect for this use you could get away with a $400 essentials license.https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Server-20...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
jlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
- you could get away with a $400 essentials license.That is what I thought so you would end up with something... MORE expensive than those NAS but less functionalities for consumer needs.
I don't know why there are some lunatics always trying to say that a DIY NAS would be cheaper and better when it is obviously not the case.
doggface - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
FreeNas is FREE. :Djlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
But not the hardware. Let's be real for a minute and stop the bull..t.A 2 bay NAS cost 250$. New.
Can you tell me how much cost, NEW, a celeron processor, 1Go of RAM, the motherboard, the case, the alimentation, the fans... to built your own NAS hardware?
What do you expect to win? 50$? Does it really worth it with all the loss of functionality? Seriously?
doggface - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
About $300 for a 5 bay implementation. Did it myself. With as I said earlier, the same feature set, A better zfs implementation... Etc etc. (see earlier posts)It's not bulls**t. I am just spreading the word, because it is just that good.
If anything the zealotry is on the side of cots. We humble freenas folk are just trying to advise you that you can have an enterprise solution for the same cost as consumer cots that is as good if not better.
jlabelle2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
- About $300 for a 5 bay implementationSo what's the point then? If it cost 300$. How much do you really save then when a DS416J cost below 300$???
- I am just spreading the word
so do it: explain how you cover the basic functions I mentioned and then we will talk.
- the same feature set,
No. And you know it is true. Just the basic features i mentioned are not all available in FreeNAS.
- advise you that you can have an enterprise solution for the same cost as consumer cots
What are "entreprise solutions" that FreeNAS offers that "consumer" NAS do not? Could you share?
Namisecond - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Unfortunately that sale ended last year. They start around $800 right now. Once you add up the cost of a server windows license, an 8 bay COTS NAS starts to look more attractive. Add in the hot-swap bays, small form factor, consumer appliance-level power consumption and noise level. A roll-your-own server sounds less appealing. Some of them even use (or can use) mid-range Intel processors.jlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
^^^^^^One thousand times this.
JimmiG - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Quite happy with my 2-bay QNAP NAS. It's much smaller and more power efficient than anything I could have built myself.RTRR is great and better than RAID IMO. The versioning works great, it's super fast to sync and it protects against corruption, accidental deletion, ransonware etc. I don't care if my media collection goes offline for a day or two while I get a new drive and restore. RAID is for when you already have a backup plan, and you absolutely need 24/7 access to your data, such as business critical applications.
jabber - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah I've been a QNAP user for years now. Small, quiet, low power and best of all all low effort. Sometimes people just feel they need to make a rod for their own back. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.tokyojerry - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Ganesh, thanks much for your intended series of posts to provide insight into NAS devices for the layperson to understand. I am relatively new to NAS devices and find something to learn all the time. So, I find an article posted like this one to be quite helpful. I've been running a NAS for just about a year now. I run a Synology DS1515+ but recently acquired QNAP's TVS-682T which still is not placed into production yet. The QNAP allows for added primary functionality of DAS and iSCSI in addition to NAS. I hope in future overviews of NAS devices you might cover these alternative configurations, when to use them, what they are for, etc. DAS I have basic ideas about but have zilch on iSCSI. Thanks muchvision33r - Wednesday, November 23, 2016 - link
Choosing your NAS depends on what you're planning to do. There's no question that any low end PC today can be converted to handle simple File sharing. If your project has multiple purposes and interfacing requirements then you might need more enterprise like features.I've done some pretty decent sized Vmware projects and SAN is your headless disk array group. At home I can replicate that with a good NAS appliance, sure it doesn't have some of the sexy tech out there like 10G or Fiber Channel but having enough drives to host your OS data and bonding multiple NIC through LACP is good enough throughput to have a decent size Vmware site in your house. You could do something like this with a built HyperV or standalone ESX box but you run the risk of having non-standard RAID and complexity to your storage. The goal is to simplify storage and decouple OS running system from their disk arrays that's why having dedicated NAS for scalability is important.
biladwardjwr48099 - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
The market for network-attached storage units has expanded significantly over the last few years.HP microservers are often down to about £170 new, given that we pay VAT and our currency is now worthless, I imagine they are about the same in $.www.earnwayz.tkbiladwardjwr48099 - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
мy coυѕιɴ ιѕ мαĸιɴɢ $51/нoυr oɴlιɴe. υɴeмployed ғor α coυple oғ yeαrѕ αɴd prevιoυѕ yeαr ѕнe ɢoт α $1З619cнecĸ wιтн oɴlιɴe joв ғor α coυple oғ dαyѕ. ѕee мore αт. www.earnwayz.tkbobthedino - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
The article refers to Samba as a "protocol" (e.g. it says "accessible using protocols such as Samba or NFS") but it is not: Samba is a particular implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol.bobthedino - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
The article states "Apple users need to enable AFP", however since version 10.9 of macOS the default file sharing protocol is SMB (see: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204445). Macs also support NFS out of the box.darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Correct and Synology at least supports this pretty well.This isn't a bad article but its pretty clear the author doesn't have extensive NAS/OS experience and did not research very well.
florajames060 - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
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