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[Guest]

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[Principis]

52 minutes ago, Endlessbit said:

Hello, long time lurker first time poster.  

 

I'm building a NAS but can't decide between FreeNAS and Unraid.

It's for my home office with 5 computers connected with Gigabit LAN focused on content creation (Non-replaceable files) + I'm going to have it serve files to my home theater pc (Replaceable files).

 

I think I'm going to run 4 drives to start with 1 parity 3 data, and I would like to be able to expand it later, from what I can tell FreeNAS is lacking in that area. but Unraid lets you add drives and replace with bigger ones at any time.

• From what I can see Linus uses Unraid more than FreeNAS.
• Unraid has a much better plugin system with docker and community applications
• Unraid store data on each drive without striping it.

So as you can see I'm leaning towards Unraid.  if you guys could help me decide that would be fantastic, and hopefully, this post will help people in the same Unraid vs FreeNAS conundrum.

unRAID

 

I've used FreeNAS and it's so difficult and hard to work with, IMO (I don't use linux much...). unRAID just works and is awesome.

It costs a bit of money but I happily paid it.

 

That's my point of view

 

Edit:

This is my system:

• IBM X3200 M2
  • Intel xeon X3350 (upgraded)
  • 8GB ECC ram
  • 3x 2TB Seagate NAS HDD
• Plugins:
  • Community Applications
  • CouchPotato
  • Plex
  • Sickrage
  • Transmission
  • Ransomware protection
  • Recycle Bin

[samiscool51]

FreeNAS vs UnRAID has been quite a big choice for many users

it realy depends on what features that you need and which OS has them

i have never used both (don't need to, mostly a windows user) but it's your choice

http://www.freenas.org/about/features/

https://lime-technology.com/what-is-unraid/ (UnRAID doesn't look to have a feature page, this lists some of the things it can do though)

[Guest]

Anyone who has just both, want to post some pro's and con's or something?

 

[Guest]

41 minutes ago, Principis said:

unRAID

 

I've used FreeNAS and it's so difficult and hard to work with, IMO (I don't use linux much...). unRAID just works and is awesome.

It costs a bit of money but I happily paid it.

 

That's my point of view

 

Edit:

This is my system:

• IBM X3200 M2
  • Intel xeon X3350 (upgraded)
  • 8GB ECC ram
  • 3x 2TB Seagate NAS HDD
• Plugins:
  • Community Applications
  • CouchPotato
  • Plex
  • Sickrage
  • Transmission
  • Ransomware protection
  • Recycle Bin

 

Have you seen any limitations after the move?

[kasugatei]

1 hour ago, Endlessbit said:

Unraid has a much better plugin system with docker and community applications

FreeNAS Corral has Docker and virtualization out of the box and it works great. Also, I would say that there is much larger community around FreeNAS.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Niksa said:

FreeNAS Corral has Docker and virtualization out of the box and it works great. Also, I would say that there is much larger community around FreeNAS.

FreeNAS Corral is not stable at the moment though is it?

[kasugatei]

4 minutes ago, Endlessbit said:

FreeNAS Corral is not stable at the moment though is it?

It is stable. Stable version has been released recently.

[Guest]

Just now, Niksa said:

It is stable. Stable version has been released recently.

It does look nice..

But it's still hard to expand and uses data striping right?

[Guest]

Can you have more than 1 array in FreeNAS Corral?

[kasugatei]

1 hour ago, Endlessbit said:

It does look nice..

But it's still hard to expand and uses data striping right?

FreeNAS uses ZFS (RAID-Z). The way it works is different than RAID but generally speaking, in terms of redundancy it is like this:

RAID-Z1 = RAID 5 (1 disk can die without data loss)

RAID-Z2 = RAID 6 (2 disks can die without data loss)

RAID-Z3 = RAID 7 (3 disks can die without data loss)

 

It strips parity bytes across the array. It is not stripping like RAID0 where in the case of the single drive failure you loose all the data.

Also, I've managed to expand the pool without issues even in the old versions.

 

1 hour ago, Endlessbit said:

Can you have more than 1 array in FreeNAS Corral?

You could do that in the old ones so I don't see why you would be unable to do in Corral

 

Btw, my suggestion is before doing anything, prepare a virtual setup in Virtual Box or similar and install FreeNAS and/or UnRAID there and explore the features.

 

[Guest]

34 minutes ago, Niksa said:

FreeNAS uses ZFS (RAID-Z). The way it works is different than RAID but generally speaking, in terms of redundancy it is like this:

RAID-Z1 = RAID 5 (1 disk can die without data loss)

RAID-Z2 = RAID 6 (2 disks can die without data loss)

RAID-Z3 = RAID 7 (3 disks can die without data loss)

 

It strips parity bytes across the array. It is not stripping like RAID0 where in the case of the single drive failure you loose all the data.

Also, I've managed to expand the pool without issues even in the old versions.

 

You could do that in the old ones so I don't see why you would be unable to do in Corral

 

Btw, my suggestion is before doing anything, prepare a virtual setup in Virtual Box or similar and install FreeNAS and/or UnRAID there and explore the features.

 

 

Oh Nice, the VB sounds like a good idea will give it a go!