NAS competition? QNAP, Synology, Or FreeNas?

[FroTo]

Hey guys,

I'm looking online for a good NAS solution, I Scoured the web and sunk lots of hours into researching. But to no avail. I could not find a definite answer so I thought, what better community to ask than LTT? 

The few real NAS solutions that stand out to me these days are (as outlined in the title) FreeNAS, Synology, and Qnap. My situation is picking one that has good flexibility, and a GREAT selection of APPs/Plugins I could use. 

Mainly,

-Plex

-Bitsync

-Virtualization support
-Transmission, 
- Remote Web management. 

 

The reason I say this is because, I myself am a power user, And I do enjoy the flexibility of heavily customizing something to my liking. Though, I know what you all are thinking, FreeNAS. Normally, I would go down this route however, I do feel intimidated by the complexity of FreeNAS ( If I were to utilize many of its functions) and the amount of time I would need to setup. ( I have multiple users in the house [6] and all use different operating systems [ubuntu, OSX, Windows]). I just simply dont have the time to do all that research. I've already spent too much on attempting to find a solution. So, what I ask here is that, are there any alternatives to this. That are simple and provide great functionality such as FreeNAS?

Well, I understand that I'm asking for a lot here, given that this is a public forum where members have the freedom to contribute or not. I want to ask the community's NAS users/enthusiasts what they think and maybe share some of their wisdom. 

 

Thanks Greatly,

[Vitalius]

Well, I think most people know what I use (FreeNAS for you who don't). 

 

-Plex

-Bitsync

-Virtualization support

-Transmission, 

- Remote Web management. 

Has it.
Has it. 
Sorta (Linux and FreeBSD only).
Has it.
Has it. 

Honestly, FreeNAS is probably going to have the title of "Most flexible", but that title usually comes with "Most buggy and easy to break". That's just how flexible things usually are (not always though). 

I haven't used the others. I can only comment on what FreeNAS is and can do. I can tell you that some of the latest releases have interesting bugs because they recently upgraded to Samba4. This is very new and is tied to a lot of FreeNAS' most used features (CIFS sharing for example). You can avoid this by getting a different version though. 

The plugins for FreeNAS are pretty much 1 click installs, but they have their own quirk in the latest version for some people where installing more than 1 at a time causes them to break unless you reboot after each plugin install. 

Or you could build them yourself manually in the jails, but I have little to no experience with that. I only know it's very possible and there are guides for such things. 

But, overall, I think you shouldn't use FreeNAS since you don't have the time to deal with it's complexity. Amahi is a File Server oriented OS with plugins as well. I haven't used it, but I know it's very simple in comparison to FreeNAS while lacking many of the advanced, enterprise features FreeNAS has. Which imo is a good thing for you. 

Here you go.

Amahi has Plex, Transmission, and Remote Web Management features. But it lacks Bitsync specifically (it has plugins similar to it), and I can't find anything about Virtualization. It's built around simplicity.

[wpirobotbuilder]

Hey guys,

I'm looking online for a good NAS solution, I Scoured the web and sunk lots of hours into researching. But to no avail. I could not find a definite answer so I thought, what better community to ask than LTT? 

The few real NAS solutions that stand out to me these days are (as outlined in the title) FreeNAS, Synology, and Qnap. My situation is picking one that has good flexibility, and a GREAT selection of APPs/Plugins I could use. 

Mainly,

-Plex

-Bitsync

-Virtualization support

-Transmission, 

- Remote Web management. 

 

The reason I say this is because, I myself am a power user, And I do enjoy the flexibility of heavily customizing something to my liking. Though, I know what you all are thinking, FreeNAS. Normally, I would go down this route however, I do feel intimidated by the complexity of FreeNAS ( If I were to utilize many of its functions) and the amount of time I would need to setup. ( I have multiple users in the house [6] and all use different operating systems [ubuntu, OSX, Windows]). I just simply dont have the time to do all that research. I've already spent too much on attempting to find a solution. So, what I ask here is that, are there any alternatives to this. That are simple and provide great functionality such as FreeNAS?

Well, I understand that I'm asking for a lot here, given that this is a public forum where members have the freedom to contribute or not. I want to ask the community's NAS users/enthusiasts what they think and maybe share some of their wisdom. 

 

Thanks Greatly,

FreeNAS is relatively difficult to use, plus the hardware requirements are enormous in addition to being complicated. You need to do some research needed to make sure every component is validated to work together, plus your system has to support FreeBSD to work. I was surprised to discover that my onboard graphics adapter does NOT support Ubuntu/Arch/etc Linux; only Windows, FreeBSD, ESXi, SUSE and RedHat Linux. Which you kind of need so you can see what is going on.

 

This also includes memory compatibility, which isn't too difficult when buying modern hardware but is a right pain in the ass when trying to find used ECC memory and a motherboard that are validated to work together.

 

TL;DR - What Vitalius said.

 

Also, what do you mean by NAS virtualization (there are multiple meanings)? The one I'm more familiar with is creating multiple virtual file servers on a single piece of hardware, but you also can have a single virtual file server hosted by a cluster of physical NAS hosts. I'm going to assume you mean the former, correct?

[Vitalius]

Also, what do you mean by NAS virtualization (there are multiple meanings)? The one I'm more familiar with is creating multiple virtual file servers on a single piece of hardware, but you also can have a single virtual file server hosted by a cluster of physical NAS hosts. I'm going to assume you mean the former, correct?

What he said before what is quoted.

I figured he meant being able to virtualize things in the OS. Like, take FreeNAS Jails as an example. They are effectively Virtual Machines running a simple host for one application. That's what I thought he meant by it.

[Ahnzh]

What he said before what is quoted.

I figured he meant being able to virtualize things in the OS. Like, take FreeNAS Jails as an example. They are effectively Virtual Machines running a simple host for one application. That's what I thought he meant by it.

For me virtualization support means xen/vmware/hyper-v/kvm support.

 

QNAP vs. Synology = better hardware vs better software

 

FreeNAS vs QNAP/Synology = harder to set up and insane hardware requirements (if running ZFS) to get maxed out speed vs. easy to set up and good out-of-the-box speed

 

Your requirements will be met by any solution so it's just a preference.

 

FreeNAS in UFS is harder to break and has got less hardware requirements. That might be the solution to go for if you really want flexibility. For everything else I

would recommend QNAP or Synology NAS solutions. 

 

Smaller QNAPs are louder but have a better quality hardware wise. They are louder, because of this quality because they are built with metal instead of plastic. The drive

vibrations result in noise because of that fact, it can be lowered a lot though by putting something heavy on top of the NAS, LOL! I still prefer Synology. Past showed

that they are fixing security issues multiple times the speed of QNAP (some bugs existed for half a year or longer). Security>performance>simplicity

[Murdoch]

I really like the Synology software. I know a few people that run Xpenology on those little HP Microservers, I honestly don't know the legality of Xpenology. But if you wanted to try out the software it's worth mentioning.

[Ahnzh]

I really like the Synology software. I know a few people that run Xpenology on those little HP Microservers, I honestly don't know the legality of Xpenology. But if you wanted to try out the software it's worth mentioning.

Xpenology should be legal. They don't alter the software and just emulate stuff. Legal - yes, stable - i don't believe in it, up to date - definitely not!

[Atlantisman]

Just dropping a quick note:

 

Virtualization support is kind of strange in FreeNAS, hyper-visors tend not to like the ZFS file system and will have quite slow performance. It is possible to tune it and get it better though. And you need lots of RAM.

[Ahnzh]

Just dropping a quick note:

 

Virtualization support is kind of strange in FreeNAS, hyper-visors tend not to like the ZFS file system and will have quite slow performance. It is possible to tune it and get it better though. And you need lots of RAM.

ZFS is nothing more than a file system. You don't have (direct) block level access to it so it shouldn't matter at all. Even if you go for iSCSI (hard to set up)

there's a service in between translating calls to the actual ZFS system. That works the same for every other file system as well. ZFS needs lots of RAM in

general for caching purposes. Always. The access to the system itself remains the same so there should be differences between FreeNAS and other

solutions in general but ZFS is a bitch. Hard to set it up for iSCSI because of an amazing amount of fine tuning so most users tend to use UFS for iSCSI

purposes BUT if set up properly ZFS's such a powerful solution.

[Ahnzh]

delete plz, quoted myself instead of edit

[Ahnzh]

WOW delete as well... double quoted myself instead of editing. WOW, never happened before

[Atlantisman]

ZFS is nothing more than a file system. You don't have (direct) block level access to it so it shouldn't matter at all. Even if you go for iSCSI (hard to set up)

there's a service in between translating calls to the actual ZFS system. That works the same for every other file system as well. ZFS needs lots of RAM in

general for caching purposes. Always. The access to the system itself remains the same so there should be differences between FreeNAS and other

solutions in general but ZFS is a bitch. Hard to set it up for iSCSI because of an amazing amount of fine tuning so most users tend to use UFS for iSCSI

purposes BUT if set up properly ZFS's such a powerful solution.

Do you by chance know how to best tune ZFS/FreeNAS for ISCSI? I have looked into it and did some stuff tuning it but stopped after a while and just used NFS. I would love to use ISCSI though.

[Ahnzh]

Do you by chance know how to best tune ZFS/FreeNAS for ISCSI? I have looked into it and did some stuff tuning it but stopped after a while and just used NFS. I would love to use ISCSI though.

I'm not into it too much but it was pretty much try'n'error at some point. To have enough speed for block level access you have to work

with ZIL/L2ARC flash drives but that again comes along with a lot of problems. Write caching means you NEED to minimize risks of failing

components. If the server dies on you you run a very high risk of leaving stuff in the write cache, not being able to write it to your vDevs

and that means a corrupted volume. Corrupted volumes lead to data loss so in case you consider iSCSI aside from the pure configuration

you need to make sure to have failover security in pretty much all your components and in the best case a redundant server with mirrored

data (can actually be cheaper than going for a full failover solution). That means quite a lot of configuration itself before even having to set

up your ZFS for iSCSI. I can share my knowledge but be sure to meet the requirements first. You risk losing all your data else!