FreeNAS

[Disturbedguy]

Hi all,

I have recently got a new PC (First since I built my current rig with an i7 970 - pics to follow).

I have been thinking about what to do with my old PC and I think I've decided on turning it into a NAS, using FreeNAS and have one or two quick questions

1. When installing FreeNAS does it install as an OS would (assuming it has no partitions) and wipes the entire drive?
2. Does anyone have any hints and tips regarding the setup? I've checked the documentation and everything seems relatively straight forward.

Thanks,

[virtuo]

1. When installing FreeNAS does it install as an OS would (assuming it has no partitions) and wipes the entire drive?
2. Does anyone have any hints and tips regarding the setup? I've checked the documentation and everything seems relatively straight forward.

Thanks,

I've built quite a few FreeNAS machines and have always put the OS on a tiny SSD or run the OS from a bootable USB. From what I remember if you have the OS on one of your storage volumes, that volume is reserved for the OS, so you waste a lot of space.


As for tips, have you considered what RAID setup you will use (if any)? which/how many drives are you putting in?

[ik9000]

no advice to offer sorry, but signing on to the thread as thinking similar thoughts, albeit with a far less competent PC.

[b0redom]

As Virtuo said, install the OS to a USB stick. I use RAID-Z on mine, but I have multiple redundant backups of the stuff I care about. As regards tips, none I can think of tbh. Just don't enable data-deduplication.

[Disturbedguy]

I've built quite a few FreeNAS machines and have always put the OS on a tiny SSD or run the OS from a bootable USB. From what I remember if you have the OS on one of your storage volumes, that volume is reserved for the OS, so you waste a lot of space.

- Ahh this is what I thought and was considering a bootable USB disl

As for tips, have you considered what RAID setup you will use (if any)? which/how many drives are you putting in?

RAID - Not really decided yet, been a while since I read up on RAID so I'm going to have a read and see what options are available to me.
As for drives, it will only be me using it, so I don't think I will need a massive amount of space but I'm thinking of a few 1 or 2TB WD Blue disks

Edit - I guess my next question is, if I want to use RAID will I need any special RAID controllers or is / will the FreeNAS software control this side of things? (I've never setup or configured RAID, in any form)

[virtuo]

You can put in hardware RAID (Motherboards generally support a few RAID modes), I quite like the software raid modes, RAIDZ-2 or RAIDZ-3, you can just plug in all your drives to your on board SATAs and FreeNAS does the clever bits.

For RAIDZ2 you need a minimum of 3 drives (1 for data and two for parity), RAID-Z3 adds an extra parity drive so a minimum of 4. I try to go Z3 if I can, but Z2 should be okay if your disk budget/count is low.

If you are going to be running it 24/7 (I'd presume you would) then might be worth looking at NAS-specific drives (WD Reds or Seagate Ironwolfs) which are rated for continuous operation. Similarly you'll want a fairly economical CPU/PSU to cut down on fan requirements - can't stand a loud NAS!

[DanceswithUnix]

ZFS doesn't use RAID controllers, it expects and relies on talking directly to the disks, so no controller cards necessary.

You will need to stripe same sized disks together though if you have a mix, so an array of 1TB drives and another array of 2TB drives.

[Disturbedguy]

ZFS doesn't use RAID controllers, it expects and relies on talking directly to the disks, so no controller cards necessary.

You will need to stripe same sized disks together though if you have a mix, so an array of 1TB drives and another array of 2TB drives.

Ahh that's the feeling I got from reading the documentation but wasn't 100% sure.

Yeah the disks I am getting will be the same sizes as ill be buying them all at once.

I just need to decide whether I want it running 24/7 or an as an when kind of thing. I'm assuming I could set it up for Wake On LAN? So when I try browsing to it, it turns on and such?

[barry2811]

You shouldn't really by using ZFS without ECC RAM. And even, then you should be looking at ~1GB for every 1TB in the pool.

I don't know why people insist on using FreeNAS all the time. NAS4Free is much lighter, and works better on non-enterprise hardware. It is also the continuation of the original FreeNAS fork, before xXSystem made it commercialised and designed for enterprise hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I think ZFS is great. But most people in the home should be running something else (I still use UFS) with proper backup strategies. People using ZFS on consumer hardware are risking their data.

[b0redom]

You can put in hardware RAID (Motherboards generally support a few RAID modes), I quite like the software raid modes, RAIDZ-2 or RAIDZ-3, you can just plug in all your drives to your on board SATAs and FreeNAS does the clever bits.

For RAIDZ2 you need a minimum of 3 drives (2 for data and one for parity), RAID-Z3 adds an extra parity drive so a minimum of 4. I try to go Z3 if I can, but Z2 should be okay if your disk budget/count is low.

Erm no, RAID-Z = 1 disk for parity (think RAID-5), RAID-Z2 = 2 disks for parity (think RAID-6).

Do not use a hardware controller with FreeNAS, it's just adding in an extra layer of complexity, and as has already been noted, if your server explodes you can swap out the disks into a new server and it'll 'just work' with a ZFS import. You can't do that without matching the RAID controller if you add hardware RAID.

[b0redom]

You shouldn't really by using ZFS without ECC RAM. And even, then you should be looking at ~1GB for every 1TB in the pool.

I don't know why people insist on using FreeNAS all the time. NAS4Free is much lighter, and works better on non-enterprise hardware. It is also the continuation of the original FreeNAS fork, before xXSystem made it commercialised and designed for enterprise hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I think ZFS is great. But most people in the home should be running something else (I still use UFS) with proper backup strategies. People using ZFS on consumer hardware are risking their data.

NAS4Free is a fork of FreeNAS 0.7 - it's BSD based too.

ECC is nice to have, but hardly essential, and 1GB/TB is a bit overkill once you get beyond a certain amount unless you've got multiple users all hitting it at once.

See here for the whole ECC/non-ECC debate.

Can you point me at citations which say that NAS4Free works 'better' on non-commerical hardware, along with what constitutes commerical hardware? I've had it running on a LeNovo TS140 server, and previously a microserver with no problems whatsoever.

Could you also expand on why you think UFS is better than ZFS? UFS doesn't do the whole COW model, and supports no redundancy.

As far as I'm concerned people can run whatever they like, just don't spread unfounded FUD.

I do agree on the backups - if it's data you care about, you should have some form of offline/out of band backup.

[DanceswithUnix]

Don't get me wrong, I think ZFS is great. But most people in the home should be running something else (I still use UFS) with proper backup strategies. People using ZFS on consumer hardware are risking their data.

I think it is fair to say that without ECC ram your data is at risk regardless of filesystem.

[peterb]

I built my NAS box from scratch (it’s a fileserver!) using Fedora and I toyed with using something like ZFS or Bitr-fs (now no longer being developed by Red Hat and being dropped from future releases) but in the end I stayed with the safe and reliable Ext3/4 filesystem, simply because the anciilliary support tools seemed much better developed, particularly if your use tape as a backup medium. It seems that streaming to tape media is quite complex, (and not as simple as using the send command, and it was an all or nothing restore, unlike dump which allows selective restores.

Not many home users use tape as their backup medium of course, and there are other backup strategies which do work with zfs, but (for me) dump is just very simple to use.

[Biscuit]

My only advise is not to jump into FreeNAS and think of it as the only option.

Before you commit to a platform (i.e. transfer many TB of data), try out the other popular ones. Such as:

FreeNAS
OpenMediaVault
NAS4Free
UnRAID (What I use - Not free, but also not expensive for a small system and can be tested for free)

And see what feels the best for you.

R/Homeserver on Reddit is pretty good for advise along these lines

[virtuo]

Erm no, RAID-Z = 1 disk for parity (think RAID-5), RAID-Z2 = 2 disks for parity (think RAID-6).

Do not use a hardware controller with FreeNAS, it's just adding in an extra layer of complexity, and as has already been noted, if your server explodes you can swap out the disks into a new server and it'll 'just work' with a ZFS import. You can't do that without matching the RAID controller if you add hardware RAID.

Whoops, didn't re-read that before posting, corrected the post thanks.

Hopefully my post didn't come across as recommending a hardware RAID approach, was not the intention, just confirming the original question that you could

[Disturbedguy]

Whoops, didn't re-read that before posting, corrected the post thanks.

Hopefully my post didn't come across as recommending a hardware RAID approach, was not the intention, just confirming the original question that you could

Nah it didn't came across fine to me.

Thanks for the replies - ill read up on some of the other suggestions and see if any of them can sway me