Miklos

I love watching LTT videos but with the recent influx of NAS/Storage videos I often have to behave like an old man yelling at the TV because I see silly mistakes.
 
Building your own NAS? Here are some basic rules of thumb:
 
1) Filesystem has to be ZFS
2) No hardware RAID cards
3) You can never have too much RAM (aim for 1GB RAM per TB of usable storage)
4) FILESYSTEM HAS TO BE ZFS
 
If you stick to those few rules, you will have a great time, but this excludes unRaid which LTT likes to use for dedicated NAS builds. unRaid uses an inferior filesystem and has strange limitations while costing money in some situations. This is nuts, as there is a superior free alternative that is just as easy to use, FreeNAS. Personally I have a FreeNAS at home but I use FreeBSD professionally to run all our NAS solutions both in Europe and in Asia.
 
New to FreeNAS? There are many blog posts, guides and videos on the subject but I always recommend checking out the excellent official documentation: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas.html (current version)
 
And I'm sure there are a lot of people here that are more than willing to aid you in case you need help finding hardware.

I love watching LTT videos but with the recent influx of NAS/Storage videos I often have to behave like an old man yelling at the TV because I see silly mistakes.
 
Building your own NAS? Here are some basic rules of thumb:
 
1) Filesystem has to be ZFS
2) No hardware RAID cards
3) You can never have too much RAM (aim for 1GB RAM per TB of usable storage)
4) FILESYSTEM HAS TO BE ZFS
 
If you stick to those few rules, you will have a great time, but this excludes unRaid which LTT likes to use for dedicated NAS builds. unRaid uses an inferior filesystem and has strange limitations while costing money in some situations. This is nuts, as there is a superior free alternative that is just as easy to use, FreeNAS. Personally I have a FreeNAS at home but I use FreeBSD professionally to run all our NAS solutions both in Europe and in Asia.
 
New to FreeNAS? There are many blog posts, guides and videos on the subject but I always recommend checking out the excellent official documentation: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas.html (current version)
 
And I'm sure there are a lot of people here that are more than willing to aid you in case you need help finding hardware.

I love watching LTT videos but with the recent influx of NAS/Storage videos I often have to behave like an old man yelling at the TV because I see silly mistakes.
 
Building your own NAS? Here are some basic rules of thumb:
 
1) Filesystem has to be ZFS
2) No hardware RAID cards
3) You can never have too much RAM (aim for 1GB RAM per TB of usable storage)
4) FILESYSTEM HAS TO BE ZFS
 
If you stick to those few rules, you will have a great time, but this excludes unRaid which LTT likes to use for dedicated NAS builds. unRaid uses an inferior filesystem and has strange limitations while costing money in some situations. This is nuts, as there is a superior free alternative that is just as easy to use, FreeNAS. Personally I have a FreeNAS at home but I use FreeBSD professionally to run all our NAS solutions both in Europe and in Asia.
 
New to FreeNAS? There are many blog posts, guides and videos on the subject but I always recommend checking out the excellent official documentation: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas.html (current version)
 
And I'm sure there are a lot of people here that are more than willing to aid you in case you need help finding hardware.

Haha I know that situation all to well, work with what you got sometimes :-)Yes ZFS is not one size fits all, but it covers pretty broadly I think we can agree on ;-)
Also most home users who doesn't know or want to learn and just need something to work out of the box should probably go with Synology or the likes anyway. I just get the sense that most here likes to tinker and learn, and they should definitely try ZFS.

I'm glad you mentioned NetApp and EMC as their solutions are built on top of FreeBSD and ZFS as with FreeNAS and TrueNAS. I do not run Windows server on anything as it has nothing to offer my solutions I can't do in FreeBSD so I can't really offer any help in that Regards other than you can run Windows in a VM on FreeBSD/FreeNAS and use a ZFS volume as your drive.
In regards to loss of data, a UPS will provide same and more insurance towards data loss and ZFS is copy on write so no loss of data once it's written, Ofc the ZIL is in memory but a UPS takes care of that easily.
But saying hardware raid is easier to replace than a software layer is nonsense, also ZFS is resistant to even HDD controller malfunctions, solar flares and what not, something that you don't get with regular hardware RAID.
As I mentioned, hardware RAID has its places, just not in most NAS setups. When we talk DAS it's an entirely different conversation :-)

Not true, FreeNAS runs fine on old hardware, and has samba also. Another misconception about FreeNAS.

I'm glad you mentioned NetApp and EMC as their solutions are built on top of FreeBSD and ZFS as with FreeNAS and TrueNAS. I do not run Windows server on anything as it has nothing to offer my solutions I can't do in FreeBSD so I can't really offer any help in that Regards other than you can run Windows in a VM on FreeBSD/FreeNAS and use a ZFS volume as your drive.
In regards to loss of data, a UPS will provide same and more insurance towards data loss and ZFS is copy on write so no loss of data once it's written, Ofc the ZIL is in memory but a UPS takes care of that easily.
But saying hardware raid is easier to replace than a software layer is nonsense, also ZFS is resistant to even HDD controller malfunctions, solar flares and what not, something that you don't get with regular hardware RAID.
As I mentioned, hardware RAID has its places, just not in most NAS setups. When we talk DAS it's an entirely different conversation :-)

You assume that people only use FreeNAS on cheaply built hardware, which is far from the case. Regarding trust, since I started using exclusively ZFS and non hardware RAID controllers in 2008 I've had zero data loss over both private NAS setups and many PB of enterprise NAS', but I'm not saying hardware RAID doesn't have it's uses they are just few and far between, especially when it comes to NAS.

Not true, FreeNAS runs fine on old hardware, and has samba also. Another misconception about FreeNAS.

Fair enough, just with all the recent videos of unRaid I assumed incorrectly. Doesn't change the flaws of the new build though.

I love watching LTT videos but with the recent influx of NAS/Storage videos I often have to behave like an old man yelling at the TV because I see silly mistakes.
 
Building your own NAS? Here are some basic rules of thumb:
 
1) Filesystem has to be ZFS
2) No hardware RAID cards
3) You can never have too much RAM (aim for 1GB RAM per TB of usable storage)
4) FILESYSTEM HAS TO BE ZFS
 
If you stick to those few rules, you will have a great time, but this excludes unRaid which LTT likes to use for dedicated NAS builds. unRaid uses an inferior filesystem and has strange limitations while costing money in some situations. This is nuts, as there is a superior free alternative that is just as easy to use, FreeNAS. Personally I have a FreeNAS at home but I use FreeBSD professionally to run all our NAS solutions both in Europe and in Asia.
 
New to FreeNAS? There are many blog posts, guides and videos on the subject but I always recommend checking out the excellent official documentation: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas.html (current version)
 
And I'm sure there are a lot of people here that are more than willing to aid you in case you need help finding hardware.

I love watching LTT videos but with the recent influx of NAS/Storage videos I often have to behave like an old man yelling at the TV because I see silly mistakes.
 
Building your own NAS? Here are some basic rules of thumb:
 
1) Filesystem has to be ZFS
2) No hardware RAID cards
3) You can never have too much RAM (aim for 1GB RAM per TB of usable storage)
4) FILESYSTEM HAS TO BE ZFS
 
If you stick to those few rules, you will have a great time, but this excludes unRaid which LTT likes to use for dedicated NAS builds. unRaid uses an inferior filesystem and has strange limitations while costing money in some situations. This is nuts, as there is a superior free alternative that is just as easy to use, FreeNAS. Personally I have a FreeNAS at home but I use FreeBSD professionally to run all our NAS solutions both in Europe and in Asia.
 
New to FreeNAS? There are many blog posts, guides and videos on the subject but I always recommend checking out the excellent official documentation: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas.html (current version)
 
And I'm sure there are a lot of people here that are more than willing to aid you in case you need help finding hardware.