Previous threads for the curious:

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554232

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878283

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360478

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367690

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906427

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954397

I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server.

FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably got a lot more value than I'm willing to admit, and I'm sure that's why it's popular, but I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly.

I also looked at it a few years ago when I last rebuilt my media server, and ultimately decided the same.

I now run SnapRAID [1] with mergerfs [2] and for my use, it's got many benefits over zfs and normal raid setups:

I could start from my existing volumes, without having to move any files.

I can use my random bunch of varying size disks purchased over several years, and add as needed. I tend to buy a new drive every couple years at whatever cheapest $/GB is, which means usually each drive is 2x the size of the last one I bought.

If something catastrophic fails like the system itself, the disks are just normal independent ext4 volumes - I can read them from basically anything. I've had to recover a RAID5 array using replacement hardware before, it's not fun and not something I want to ever have to do at home.

[1] https://www.snapraid.it/

[2] https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs

I actually use RAID6 with mdadm, and it's also portable to different machines. I was kind of surprised the first time I moved the array to a new machine and it all just worked.

> I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly

I set up a 6 drive FreeNAS box in an old gaming computer I had around, just for the purpose of learning how it works. And out of love for BSD, of course. Not everything has to undergo a cost/benefit analysis, some like to play.

Most people probably don't setup RAID/other redundancy schemes often enough to be able to do it confidently in 5 minutes on the command line, so why not use something that makes it easier?

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. JBOD is a totally valid strategy for a home disk array. Add in k parity drives and you can even recover from k total drive failures. RAID is not the end all be all of multi-disk storage.

What I'm saying is that the cost of being on a non-standard distro is greater than the benefit the freenas UI provides. Even if you want to run RAID, it's one or two commands with mdadm. FreeBSD and ZFS makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

Wait, ZFS requires maintenance?

I’ve been running freenas for years and have deployed/ran ZFS solutions as part of my job for a decade- this is the first I’m learning about that, it’s usually set and forget.

Am I just a bad admin?

Somewhat depends. Scrubbing is about detecting bit rot. You need to make sure that all of your data is periodically accessed so that zfs can check for errors. You can accomplish this either by having a workload which touches all of your data on a regular basis or by scrubbing. Depends on your setup.

Scrubbing is still preferable though, as normal reads won't cause every copy of the metadata to be read. Likewise, on a mirrored pair of disks, a given block of file content will only be read from one disk. (That is, since the file content is verified using checksums contained in the metadata, we don't need to read the file data back from both disks, so they can be used to service read requests independently of one another.)

All good points, especially about mirrors.

I added `zpool scrub tank` to cron once a week.

Same here, I ran FreeNAS for 3+ years ZFS and all that. After having a drive die, replacing the wrong drive, trying to recover and loosing all the data (I had a 2month old drive in a Bank safe so was able to recover) but after that I switch to Synology that provides a nice blinking light for the failed drive, auto updating OS, surveillance, plex, etc I never looked back. Since then I've bought at least 10 more for work and family. Sure a drive dies every few years but w/ RAID6 and Amazon a swap is 2 days away click repair move on. Coupled w/ B2 cloud backup I never worry about data loss anymore. Synology is an appliance, FreeNAS was a pet, at this point in my life I don't have time for Pets.

> ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

According to FreeBSD's handbook[0], you only need to scrub the drives once a month, and check `zpool status` regularly.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html

My crontab:

  # scrub
  0       1       1,15    *       *       zpool scrub zroot
  0       8       5,20    *       *       send_admin_email "zpool status" "$(zpool status)"

FreeNAS does this as a scheduled job though.

I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/

I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.

I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.

I understand your experience. It was only after time spent comparing models that I found that a slightly easier way (which may not work for you or anyone else) is to figure out three things:

- start with the number of drive bays you’d like to have (Synology has a good calculator page you can use to figure out different configurations, if you wish to go that deep).

- the model year you’d prefer (newer, older, etc.). This is part of the model (like DSx17 is from 2017, DSy18 is from 2018).

- and if you prefer an Intel CPU or a non-x86/ARM CPU (this decides what kind of additional software you can find or run easily).

This is still a lot of work, but breaking it down helps.

Hah! I have been there. In the end I took the plunge and bought a DS218+.

- 2 bays so that I can run one big HD for storage and an SSD for software (backups in the cloud and on external drives)

- Intel CPU for best compatibility with software packages from third party sources and docker

- decent video playback support

I have had it for 1.5 years and haven't looked back. I don't run much on it other than Plex, torrents, syncthing and time machine backups. But it is so much better than my old laptop that I was using for all this before.

I just went for the gold and bought the 8 Bay system. We run out Plex server on it, backups, file server etc. Still have 2 bays unused.

Why is that?

I overanalyze everything.

I did the exact same thing. A year on FreeNAS which did “work” but required so much fiddling that I bought a Synology and have never looked back.

After some years of FreeNAS at home and in the company I've decided to go with Unraid for my home storage, it's just easier to add and change drives and the UI is more focused on storage too. Adding how easy it is to use e.g. NextCloud with Unraid I'm much happier than with FreeNAS.

For those looking for a linux based NAS distribution, you should also take a look at openmediavault here https://www.openmediavault.org/

It has been running on my home server for 5+ years now and it's a delight. It also supports ZFS through a plugin.

quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site:

• "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended."

• "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended."

The example configuration for a "Home Media Server or Small Office File Share" even suggests "16 GB RAM".

I've heard that ZFS is quite RAM hungry, but c'mon, 16GB for a home media server?

I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris, Illumos, and then Linux, continuously since 2009. (However, I have no experience of using it on FreeBSD.) I've always regarded FreeNAS's RAM recommendations as being weirdly high. The "1GB per terabyte" thing dates from when ZFS systems were being pushed as enterprise workgroup file servers (i.e. maybe hundreds of users), with all storage on spinning rust. I wager that a great many FreeNAS systems are seeing approximately one user, primarily accessing large media files which mostly don't benefit that much from caching. Though of course, if you really are using FreeNAS in a more demanding role, then the hardware should reflect that.

I believe it did used to be the case that the FreeBSD port of ZFS had an issue where ZFS wouldn't always back off its RAM use fast enough, if the system came under memory presure, so it was at the time prudent to ensure that FreeBSD ZFS machines never got into low-memory situations, but I haven't heard anybody complain about that in practice in some years, so presumably it's fixed now, but FreeNAS's RAM recommendations have not been relaxed.

FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements.

You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use.

However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.

I ran a ZFS file server and VM host for years with 6GB of RAM. It'll work fine, just don't use dedup.

With drive capacities topping 10TB and dedup being what it is, it's not too far of a stretch?

Those specs would be without dedup enabled (which generally isn’t in ZFS because it’s quite an expensive feature).

Yeah 8GB seems excessive. My Synology has 2GB of RAM and does just fine. I run multiple docker containers on it aswell.

That’s likely because Synology doesn’t offer ZFS or anything near the same capabilities.

synology uses btrfs which provides almost the same capabilities, but ZFS usually eats all the RAM it gets as some sort of cache to speed up disk operations.

You are thinking of the ARC. By default, ZFS will allocate what is available but you can constrain it as you like.

Is there anyone here who prefers FreeNAS over vanilla FreeBSD+zfs and would like to share their experience?

I've been running FreeBSD with zfs for many years. I'm unsure if it was the right decision, but I did learn a lot and it's been extremely stable after the initial setup :-)

If you are looking for something like this, try unraid.net. you can run docker templates and plugins, easily add storage and has a friendly community.

not the same, as it isn't free :)

Why is this a news story?

It’s not news per se. I upvoted since I’m interested in the discussion of various alternatives for storage (both for personal and business use).

It’s also interesting because of the current kerfuffle regarding the future of ZFS. For people who want to read up on that, this thread is quite interesting: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-...

certainly because of recent Linus comments on ZFS

Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181

Linus’ comment on ZFS lacking new development / maintenance is really misleading. OpenZFS is doing both and there is a very large, vibrant development community.