FreeNAS Alternatives

[alex75871]

Hello,

 

I have been using FreeNAS for almost four years now without any incidents, however, I am running out of storage and there is no *easy* way to expand my existing media pool. Therefore, I am looking for alternatives.

 

The link to my server build in my signature is outdated. My current hardware is:

Supermicro X9SRL-F motherboard

Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 2.8 GHz 10 cores 25 M cache

64 GB RAM (4x 16 GB modules) Hynix ECC Registered DDR3 1866

8x WD Red 4 TB hard drives (mass storage, configured in RAIDZ2)

2x Intel 540s 480 GB SSDs (VM storage configured in mirror)

Fractal Design R5

3x 140 mm Noctua fans and narrow ILM CPU heatsink

 

I use my server for file sharing (obviously), PLEX, personal cloud and VMs.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can add anouther 4 drives in a raid z1 to expand if you want.

 

But if you want a easy to expand nas os id look at unraid. Or roll your own linux distro with btrfs or snapraid + mergerfs.

[dalekphalm]

If easy expandability is important to you, I would consider unRAID, which is NAS oriented, or FlexRAID, which runs on top of Windows or Linux (Ubuntu is recommended by the devs).

 

The benefit of FlexRAID is that the RAID system sits on top of the HDD file system.

 

Example:

In a Windows based FlexRAID setup, the drives are all formatted as NTFS. You can literally pull any drive and pop it into any Windows based computer and pull data off it. Another benefit is that if your RAID Array fails (lets say you lost 2 drives but only had "RAID5" single drive tolerance), then you actually only lose the data from the failed drives.

 

You add each drive into the pool, and you designate the number of parity drives you want to use. You can also combine smaller drives together to form a larger virtual drive.

 

You can also mix and match drive sizes - the only requirement is your parity drive needs to be the same size (or larger) as your largest data drive.

 

With that in mind @alex75871 ZFS is currently working on live ZFS expansion - I just read about it today. Current ETA is "fall 2018" but there's no firm timeline that I'm aware of.

[alex75871]

3 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

If easy expandability is important to you, I would consider unRAID, which is NAS oriented, or FlexRAID, which runs on top of Windows or Linux (Ubuntu is recommended by the devs).

 

The benefit of FlexRAID is that the RAID system sits on top of the HDD file system.

 

Example:

In a Windows based FlexRAID setup, the drives are all formatted as NTFS. You can literally pull any drive and pop it into any Windows based computer and pull data off it. Another benefit is that if your RAID Array fails (lets say you lost 2 drives but only had "RAID5" single drive tolerance), then you actually only lose the data from the failed drives.

 

You add each drive into the pool, and you designate the number of parity drives you want to use. You can also combine smaller drives together to form a larger virtual drive.

 

You can also mix and match drive sizes - the only requirement is your parity drive needs to be the same size (or larger) as your largest data drive.

 

With that in mind @alex75871 ZFS is currently working on live ZFS expansion - I just read about it today. Current ETA is "fall 2018" but there's no firm timeline that I'm aware of.

Thank you dalekphalm for your insight into alternative RAID systems. I find your comment about live ZFS expansion particularly interesting, I may stick with FreeNAS or ZFS on alternative linux distro if this functionality is implemented.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, alex75871 said:

Thank you dalekphalm for your insight into alternative RAID systems. I find your comment about live ZFS expansion particularly interesting, I may stick with FreeNAS or ZFS on alternative linux distro if this functionality is implemented.

Here's the official link:

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/project/development-of-the-raid-z-expansion-feature-for-zfs/

 

And a vid talking about it (Note: I haven't had time to watch the vid):

Now, I have no idea whether this is for RAIDZ in any configuration, or just RAIDZ1. Perhaps the video clarifies this, but as I said, I haven't watched it yet.