A few bits of advice to those considering this... I had a 12-drive setup a few years ago, it eventually crashed and burned, because of several errors on my part. (surrounding ZFS)
Use a MB with ECC Ram (Asus + AMD seems to be the most cost effective option here). Also, you should max out the ram on the board, especially if you're aiming for a raid z2 array of more than 10GB (I did max my ram, but didn't go ECC).
Source the same drive from as many places as possible to try to get different mfg runs. I had really bad luck here, about 3/4 of the seagate drives I'd purchased died in under 2 years... The drive model itself had a really poor quality and many people had issues with these drives dying a short death.
Ensure your "hot spare" drives work... I'd configured for 2 hot spare drives, however, there was a bug in the version of FreeNAS I was using that caused the hot spares to not go into usage automatically.
Make sure that anything important on your NAS is backed up... if it's only on the NAS, that is not a backup. Hardware can and will fail. I tend to not consider something backed up unless it is in at least 3 copies and at least 2 different locations.
Overall, it was just a piss-poor experience, in the end I went back to Synology for my NAS usage... I spent a lot of money in hopes of having a close to "final" NAS solution, with a lot of defective hardware, a lot of failures, and in general, my "backup" NAS was more reliable. There's something to be said for buying a solution vs. DIY.
I might consider it again in a few years, but am more likely to just get a 5-8 drive product over DIY again. Drives have gotten a lot larger... at the time I went with 3TB, and 4TB were just starting to come out.
I probably should have mentioned that, but I guess I was trying too hard to be pithy. When I looked, a 10.3-RELEASE branch/tag didn't exist, but based on the schedule and last commit I assumed the source was frozen.
Anyway, I was only half-joking; it actually is fairly impressive to be able to leapfrog the FreeBSD process in this way, even if some of the difference comes down to differing requirements and priorities.
If it's interesting to anyone, I evaluated a few NAS software and landed on Unraid, which is not as popular, but quite nice. It's not free (but it's cheap), but the way I can easily expand storage and Docker support sealed the deal for me.
I've been contemplating using FreeNAS, but I'm always confused by the product release information. It's written for those who already use the product, rather than those who are considering it.
To me, the ideal announcement would read something like this:
- This product is based on FreeBSD 10.3
- This product adds the following features (e.g. GUI system admin) ...
- This product improves the following standard FreeBSD ports ...
- This product is available on the FreeNAS Mini NAS appliance ...
etc
Otherwise, it's hard to know if I should try FreeNAS or just try plain vanilla FreeBSD for a file server I want to build.
FreeNAS has a commercial company behind it, with a real product and money to back the project with (just as RedHat with their projects) while nas4free is a open source project. I've chosen FreeNAS and its doing its job well to this day (backups, few seervices like SMB/CIFS, plex server and what's most important, software containers).
NAS4Free is the original freenas code, which went into a bit of a neglect phase. There was also talk of rewriting on Linux before the fork, which triggered the FreeNAS fork I believe.
On Nas4free jails are still unsupported. You can have them, but you'll be doing so via terminal. FreeNAS has them in the GUI, and it's standard for plugins to run in a jail.
I stopped following nas4free too closely when I went with the freenas side, so there may be other differences. I haven't used nas4free since it was still freenas, so it's not fair to give detail differences.
Use a MB with ECC Ram (Asus + AMD seems to be the most cost effective option here). Also, you should max out the ram on the board, especially if you're aiming for a raid z2 array of more than 10GB (I did max my ram, but didn't go ECC).
Source the same drive from as many places as possible to try to get different mfg runs. I had really bad luck here, about 3/4 of the seagate drives I'd purchased died in under 2 years... The drive model itself had a really poor quality and many people had issues with these drives dying a short death.
Ensure your "hot spare" drives work... I'd configured for 2 hot spare drives, however, there was a bug in the version of FreeNAS I was using that caused the hot spares to not go into usage automatically.
Make sure that anything important on your NAS is backed up... if it's only on the NAS, that is not a backup. Hardware can and will fail. I tend to not consider something backed up unless it is in at least 3 copies and at least 2 different locations.
Overall, it was just a piss-poor experience, in the end I went back to Synology for my NAS usage... I spent a lot of money in hopes of having a close to "final" NAS solution, with a lot of defective hardware, a lot of failures, and in general, my "backup" NAS was more reliable. There's something to be said for buying a solution vs. DIY.
I might consider it again in a few years, but am more likely to just get a 5-8 drive product over DIY again. Drives have gotten a lot larger... at the time I went with 3TB, and 4TB were just starting to come out.