Freenas VS Unraid

[DemiSLayer]

Ive been using freenas for my home kodi/plex server.  however im having to wipe and start again.  I have no experience with unraid.

 

Anyone using unraid for media server ?   

 

I would like to stream 4k content at some point as well. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What specs and storage config?

 

Freenas has zfs that is faster and better for data intergrity, but unraid easily lets you mix and match drives.

 

For streaming, both should preform about the same, if you want to transcode 4k you gonna need a lot of cpu power, but just streaming it can be done on almost anything.

[DemiSLayer]

Am running an older dual 3.4ghz (8core total) xeon hpxw8600 workstation  with 8x 3tb drives.  

[DemiSLayer]

16gb 667 memory  i have another set of 16gb 800mhz memory thought they wont work together.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, DemiSLayer said:

16gb 667 memory  i have another set of 16gb 800mhz memory thought they wont work together.

DO you want to transcode media in plex?

 

Either of those oses(or other options like windows, debian, ubuntu, centos) will work fine and performance will be about the same.

[DemiSLayer]

not sure I need to transcode but might in future.   Is zfs supported in anything other than freenas?

[scristaldi]

Most people I know had the same experience with Free NAS... could not get them running or could not keep them running and little to no help from their so called forum.

Be interested to see how it goes for you.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, DemiSLayer said:

not sure I need to transcode but might in future.   Is zfs supported in anything other than freenas?

zfs can run on almost any linux distro and some other oses(like most *bsd and osx)

 

There are ofhter file systems that have similar features to zfs like btrfs and storage spaces.

[Mikensan]

If it is just a matter of getting a plugin working, I've never had an issue with FreeNAS personally. But there are some caveats beyond them just working...

 

To get the most out of a plugin / jail that will persist through updates you have to put a little bit of elbow grease in. Normally a jail/plugin will create its own storage and use that - however with a kernel update or for any reason you need to delete the jail, you'll utimately lose that storage and thus your settings/configuration. To get around this you simply create your own dataset(s) for your plugins and mount them within the jail where whatever plugin you chose stores its files. So this requires knowledge of the folders being used (by plex for example) and how to mount the storage (very easy to do in the new UI).

 

I think for the free unraid license you can only use 1 disk, so just keep in mind you'll have to pay for a license. Linux has a bigger following so you're likely to find a lot more support for unraid, even outside of their forums. Anything you need help on you can just replace "unraid" with "debian" and get help.

 

If you're just putting movies and personal files on it, I don't think you will notice any real difference between FreeNAS and unraid.