FreeNAS vs simple SAMBA setup?

[TechSquidTV]

I have a little "home server"  running Plex on one 3TB WD RED drive. I need a NAS to handle my Youtube content. The Lenovo ThinkServer I am using has RAID capability. I was planning on setting up a RAID1 on the two new storage drives, and then installing SAMBA on the server so I can access it via my Windows PC and use window's automatic backup.

 

FreeNAS I don't honestly know much about. I see it runs AD which is really cool, but I am the only user in my home lol. I see you can configure RAID in FreeNAS, this is a software based RAID right? Is there any downside to this?One thing that does seem interesting to me is the ability to set up an SSD cache, maybe I would do this in the future. 

 

Is FreeNAS complete overkill for my situation? Or am I ignorant of the benefits (which I accept I likely am). I see FreeNAS shares over SMB anyway, I can create a RAID via hardware and I am the only user on the network here at home. SAMBA the way to go? Planning to just run SAMBA alongside PLEX.

[SCHISCHKA]

38 minutes ago, Ampix0 said:

I see you can configure RAID in FreeNAS, this is a software based RAID right?

ZFS, its good. The competition for it is BTRFS. its a copy on write system that can handle mirroring, striping, and parity. Some of it's features may require more hardware. Read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

40 minutes ago, Ampix0 said:

One thing that does seem interesting to me is the ability to set up an SSD cache

Outside of running a database I have not seen a good reason to use SSD cache and I have been asking for months for someone to give me a use case.

41 minutes ago, Ampix0 said:

Is FreeNAS complete overkill for my situation?

If you like web gui management its very good.

I used FreeNAS for a little bit, but just like pfsense I moved all my machines back to linux server managed through command line that I am familiar with.

44 minutes ago, Ampix0 said:

I was planning on setting up a RAID1 on the two new storage drives

You dont need RAID1 on a home media server, keep the second disk for offline backup, or put it in your pc as local backup drive

[TechSquidTV]

43 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

ZFS, its good. The competition for it is BTRFS. its a copy on write system that can handle mirroring, striping, and parity. Some of it's features may require more hardware. Read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Outside of running a database I have not seen a good reason to use SSD cache and I have been asking for months for someone to give me a use case.

If you like web gui management its very good.

I used FreeNAS for a little bit, but just like pfsense I moved all my machines back to linux server managed through command line that I am familiar with.

You dont need RAID1 on a home media server, keep the second disk for offline backup, or put it in your pc as local backup drive

 

Thank you for the very informative response. So it appears that a hardware RAID is actually not as reliable as use a ZFS file system. And there is the reasoning behind using another OS such as FreeNAS which uses that file system? It appears you can install and use ZFS on Ubuntu... and perhaps this would be best for my media server as well... assuming Plex works on ZFS. I think you've given me a lot to look at

 

[njmyers3]

If you want raid, Linux has mdadm software raid built in. If you want a graphical interface, you could install a web management solution such as Webmin. Either solution is good, but I personally use Samba because I have more experience with Linux than FreeBSD.

[SCHISCHKA]

8 hours ago, Ampix0 said:

Thank you for the very informative response. So it appears that a hardware RAID is actually not as reliable as use a ZFS file system. And there is the reasoning behind using another OS such as FreeNAS which uses that file system? It appears you can install and use ZFS on Ubuntu... and perhaps this would be best for my media server as well... assuming Plex works on ZFS. I think you've given me a lot to look at

 

 Linux has btrfs which I prefer to zfs. There are minor issues with zfs on Linux, you can google those, the main one for me is potential breakage on upgrade.

[79wjd]

9 hours ago, Ampix0 said:

Thank you for the very informative response. So it appears that a hardware RAID is actually not as reliable as use a ZFS file system. And there is the reasoning behind using another OS such as FreeNAS which uses that file system? It appears you can install and use ZFS on Ubuntu... and perhaps this would be best for my media server as well... assuming Plex works on ZFS. I think you've given me a lot to look at

 

Hardware RAID with a good RAID card is good. Hardware RAID with the onboard (motherboard) RAID controller is bad. So, hardware RAID isn't inherently bad, it's just more expensive than ZFS. 

 

FreeNAS also supports Plex.