My NAS solution, looking to revamp

[redhat]

I recently bought a MacBook Pro and have experienced Apple's poor implementation/specialties/quirks of SMB2.

My current, DAS/NAS solution is an ITX AMD AM1 Sempron system, running Ubuntu Server, with my Drobo Gen 2 connected via USB 2. This Drobo contains (4) x 4TB WD Red hard drives. The Drobo is connected, mounted and formatted NTFS; folders on the volume are setup as shares.

The server has Webmin installed and also used to host my Ubiquiti UniFi server and a PLEX Media server... in addition to my SMB file sharing. Under Windows... it worked pretty well!

With poor performance (read of about 40MB/s and write 30MB/s), strange SMB quirks with OS X and general scare of the device going belly up - Drobo being proprietary and about five years old, I am considering a new solution. Something with better performance and better designed as a NAS.

I am considering on re-vamping my mini ITX internals to a more user friendly 4-bay front swappable case, installing the hard drives and using FreeNAS.

Has anyone used it before? Does it work well? I can only imagine my performance will get better as to worse. FreeNAS uses ZFS, correct? I can't imagine its any worse off than Drobo's BeyondRAID. If a drive fails, can you swap in a new drive and tell it to rebuild it's array? Or does it do this automatically? Does ZFS manage it's own redundancy or do I have to specify 0,1,5,10 when I set it up?

 

[GenesisGuy70]

 

[Rand]

zfs is an option. Freenas has tons of options.
nothing is really "automatic" like a drobo.. you set it up how you want it setup.
You will probably need 4-8GB of ram and a much stronger processor to use it.

I also recommend you setup a temporary system then after you get a feel for freenas migrate your data onto it.

 

[Killer223]

i like freenas, but if you have ubuntu, all the tools are there, it's just you setting them up. might look into windows home server. it has some very nice features.
but yea FreeNas is a great NAS server.

NAS4Free is a good choice as it has some of the old freenas developers.

i'm a linux lover through and through, but i have to give props to windows home server. several computers on my home network are windows. and its been great for them. my linux boxes are ok with talking to it as well.

there is a way you can get you mac's timemachine backup to your SMB shares. you have to create a sparsebundle with the name of the computer in the filename. some thing like mac1.sparsebundle
anyhow research it.

 

[ATS-V]

I use freenas and have been for the past 6 years or so. I backup my office (windows & linux) and also my remote servers over the internet. I does the job and has not given me any issues. A few years ago I had a hardware failure (old) and I popped the drives out and put them in a new(er) machine and all I had to do was reconfigure the NIC.

 

[badtlc]

if you are considering price at all, have you looked into something like the WD my cloud? I know you can enable NFS and other options when you get into the guts. They are very affordable and the multi-drive setups are really fast. Even their single drive solution has very good speeds.

 

[kschachn]

Originally Posted By: Throt

Lol, my thoughts exactly.

Geez, I thought I was doing good with my AirPort Time Capsule

 

[spackard]

When I bought a FreeNAS-based box (IXSystems) I took it apart and made a
build of materials for it.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ij7GIKF7JuZfqQW239L_-9NPvelYTq7Bg3GcxyofZWw

At the time I paid $800 used (I think) and the list price on the parts came out
to somewhat over $1200. I haven't updated the prices since mid 2016.
The SATA disk on module I'm pretty sure has been discontinued.

It's available here: https://www.amazon.com/FreeNAS-Mini-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B00EQJ6HQC

Things I like:
- Uses zfs, but I've only had to go to the CLI initially, to move my datasets
over from an old box
- Power draw is about 30W, so when I leave it on 24/7 it doesn't cost an arm
and a leg.

"zfs" is a dataset. "zpool" is the underlying structure where you
configure your reliability and speed. Most people configure a RAIDZ or RAIDZ2
zpool. It has no problem keeping up with 1Gbps Ethernet.

I can't remember how automatic HDD replacement is with FreeNAS, but
zfs on Solaris (where it originated) requires commands to be issued
to do the replacement.

 

[redhat]

I decided against building a FreeNAS box and instead bought a QNAP TS-431+. When it arrives I will do a mini review of it.