FreeNAS isn't what I expected?

[jgreco]

The Intel boards are typically very good but sometimes a little less polished...

 

[wintermute000]

First Trif55, I appreciate you starting this discussion. I share the sentiments that you described in your original post. What attracted me to FreeNAS in the first place was the idea of recycling computer components make a server.

I think that if they took the word free out of the name, this sentiment and the accompanying issues it causes (if research is not done and people dive in head first) would largely go away.

You're better off with a non-ZFS, more turn-key solution like XPenology, open media vault or Windows Server with storage spaces. Or heck just straight up linux with mdadm.

 

[New2NAS]

I think that if they took the word free out of the name, this sentiment and the accompanying issues it causes (if research is not done and people dive in head first) would largely go away.

I think you're right when you're speaking about new users of FreeNAS. However, I have been using FreeNAS before FreeNAS split into FreeNAS 8 and NAS4Free. Also, the majority of articles covering FreeNAS7 really pushed the idea of creating a server from spare parts. I couldn't find any articles from 2010 but this one from 2012 captures the idea (They push to create a NAS box using things that were lying around):
Article Here

Also proper protection from lightning is expensive, that's the reason he doesn't have it, not because he has no important data

<-This

NAS isn't what you need.

I mean the following questions in the most sincere way. Panz what is the best use for FreeNAS in your opinion? Are you using it in a professional context? I honestly thought most were using FreeNAS similar to how I use it. Having said that, this wouldn't be the first time that I've been wrong.

Thanks for the comments everyone, like I said before I appreciate the conversation.

 

[jgreco]

To date, most free software NAS packages have targeted the home user. FreeNAS is targeting a different segment. iX is developing a commercial NAS product, TrueNAS, and FreeNAS is the core of that offering, in much the same way that VMware provides free ESXi. FreeNAS targets the serious users who understand what ZFS is, but who may not want to pay for Nexenta or roll their own ZFS based solution.

You can argue that FreeNAS should be able to recycle old hardware and that it ought to run on your old 486 with 32MB of RAM if you want, just like some other NAS packages. But arguing that would kind of be like arguing that all cars should be designed as subcompact budget cars. That's going to be popular with certain people, but when you have the need to haul around six people, it's going to be an unhappy day.

No one here will be offended if you select another NAS product because you cannot afford the minimum hardware requirements for FreeNAS. There are plenty of them to choose from. There are very few NAS packages which can easily handle being put on a 48-drive 128GB RAM package and just work, so I'm going to suggest that FreeNAS is targeted at a portion of the market that is shy on good options.

 

[panz]

Panz what is the best use for FreeNAS in your opinion? Are you using it in a professional context? I honestly thought most were using FreeNAS similar to how I use it. Having said that, this wouldn't be the first time that I've been wrong.

I'm using FreeNAS at home: It holds valuable data and multimedia as well. I'm planning to backup all our home computers to it, once I'll become more expert ;)

I think that — even multimedia data — are valuable: I spent hundreds of hours ripping my DVDs and my music CDs to put them available in my home LAN. The FreeNAS box will take care of our iPads and iPhones backup and will take care of our surveillance camera recordings.

I mean, this is a professional use in my opinion.

 

[joeschmuck]

I love FreeNAS! Okay, love might be a strong word but I'll tell you what, it does everything I need in a NAS and much more. My system purchase handles everything I can throw at it and likely much more, but I purchased an AMD system, I took a risk and it paid off.

I use mine primarily for automated backups of my family computer systems (that is four systems) using Acronis, and then for streaming movies using the Plex Plug-in or the MiniDLNA Plug-in (both are running). CIFS sharing is also used for photos and much other data I would rather not store on my main computer. I use the DYNDNS feature as well to ensure I can access my network from the outside world. I use the FTP Server for sharing data with my sons or maybe a friend but I turn that on and off as needed. That is about it. There are a lot of other features I could use but I don't need those, not yet at least.

FreeNAS can do a lot of things but what you need to figure out is what you need and want to do with it, then buy hardware for that purpose.

 

[AlainD]

To date, most free software NAS packages have targeted the home user. FreeNAS is targeting a different segment. iX is developing a commercial NAS product, TrueNAS, and FreeNAS is the core of that offering, in much the same way that VMware provides free ESXi. FreeNAS targets the serious users who understand what ZFS is, but who may not want to pay for Nexenta or roll their own ZFS based solution.

You can argue that FreeNAS should be able to recycle old hardware and that it ought to run on your old 486 with 32MB of RAM if you want, just like some other NAS packages. But arguing that would kind of be like arguing that all cars should be designed as subcompact budget cars. That's going to be popular with certain people, but when you have the need to haul around six people, it's going to be an unhappy day.

No one here will be offended if you select another NAS product because you cannot afford the minimum hardware requirements for FreeNAS. There are plenty of them to choose from. There are very few NAS packages which can easily handle being put on a 48-drive 128GB RAM package and just work, so I'm going to suggest that FreeNAS is targeted at a portion of the market that is shy on good options.

Unfortunally that's not what on the FreeNAS website and thus the message from iXsystems. Some things from the FAQ :

"
3. What do I need to get started with FreeNAS?

To use FreeNAS, you'll need standard PC hardware with a 64-bit processor and at least 8GB of RAM, a 4GB USB Flash drive, and a FreeNAS installation file. Either write FreeNAS directly to the flash drive or boot the CD installer to have it done for you. Point your web browser at the IP address of the FreeNAS system and you're good to go! Read the FreeNAS Documentation for more information."

"
FreeNAS Recommended Hardware:

64-bit x86 Processor with at least four physical cores
8GB RAM
2GB Flash Drive for installation (use 4GB to be sure it's big enough)
At least two hard drives of the same model and capacity for storage
Wired network port (wireless not supported)
Computer on the same network with a modern web browser (for management)

FreeNAS Minimum Hardware:

64-bit x86 Processor
2GB RAM
2GB Flash Drive for installation (use 4GB to be sure it's big enough)
At least one additional disk for storage.
Wired network port (wireless not supported)
Computer on the same network with a modern web browser (for management)
"
They write "standard PC hardware"!
No ECC-ram or server-class hardware mentioned, rather the opposite.
Unfortunately OpenZFS expects server class hardware with at least ECC ram and "tested" components.

 

[jgreco]

Feel free to submit a bug report for the FAQ then. The manual and the forum are both fairly explicit that 8GB is the required minimum. Link to bug reporter/tracker conveniently at the top of this page.

 

[Ericloewe]

Feel free to submit a bug report for the FAQ then. The manual and the forum are both fairly explicit that 8GB is the required minimum. Link to bug reporter/tracker conveniently at the top of this page.

I did, once (at least for the download links), but it didn't do much good.

 

[AlainD]

Feel free to submit a bug report for the FAQ then. The manual and the forum are both fairly explicit that 8GB is the required minimum. Link to bug reporter/tracker conveniently at the top of this page.

I think that iXsystems considers that "standard PC hardware " is enough and so I don't consider the FAQ as a bug.

 

[pschatz100]

This thread has been "entertaining." The OP starts out by complaining that he's having difficulty getting his system to run on old hardware and using a variety of old disks. The conversation then turns to data integrity, Raid, comments about sophisticated file systems, memory requirements, and then back to the original topic about running old hardware with minimal memory. Thanks for some good reading.

It is clear that there is confusion about how ZFS works and the resources it needs, otherwise there would no questioning the memory requirements. Blaming FreeNAS for this is just plain silly - although I completely agree that the FreeNAS site would benefit from a more realistic presentation of the minimum hardware specs. I think the underlying problem is that, when folks choose FreeNAS for a solution they are also choosing a filesystem but they don't understand the consequences of that choice (higher memory requirement.) This will become even more of an issue with FreeNAS 9.3.

FreeNAS will run OK with 4Gb memory and one 2Tb disk - but very few people would actually do this. Several times NAS4Free has been suggested as an alternative, but I suspect that NAS4Free with a 6x3Tb RaidZ2 would have a similar memory requirement to FreeNAS with the same RaidZ2. Of course, NAS4Free still supports UFS which would allow one to build a machine with lower spec. For people who understand the difference, the choice is straightforward.

 

[AlainD]

...

It is clear that there is confusion about how ZFS works and the resources it needs, otherwise there would no questioning the memory requirements. Blaming FreeNAS for this is just plain silly - although I completely agree that the FreeNAS site would benefit from a more realistic presentation of the minimum hardware specs. I think the underlying problem is that, when folks choose FreeNAS for a solution they are also choosing a filesystem but they don't understand the consequences of that choice (higher memory requirement.) This will become even more of an issue with FreeNAS 9.3.

...

I'm not worrying about the amount of memory, almost all MB's in use will support 8GB, or they should be very old or "weak". This would be very old hardware and not a big money loss. I also expect that FreeNAS will give plenty of warning for the low memory amount, easy to do.

There's a far bigger "problem" with the statement "standard PC hardware ". OpenZFS expects ECC-memory and has itself no memory checks, in openZFS there's no protection build in for everything that's in memory, typical several GB.
It can take months or even years before a memory "flip" gives problems, maybe never.

Those people that plan to buy "standard PC hardware" and visit the forum will hear in the forum (correctly) that this is a very bad idea. Those that don't visit the forums have one sentence in the manual that warns them for using non-ECC memory.

Some off those with standard PC hardware will lose their storage completely.

BTW. I know that off-site backups that are verified are needed anyway. (I have several off them.)

 

[Trif55]

I think that if they took the word free out of the name, this sentiment and the accompanying issues it causes (if research is not done and people dive in head first) would largely go away.

I think you just about hit the nail on the head with this. Also maybe some of the old reputation of earlier versions of freeNAS being used by people on old hardware leads to articles like this: http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/01/how-to-set-up-a-home-file-server-using-freenas/ with no mention of server spec ECC builds, and a general feeling on other more generic forums that freeNAS is the answer to the "cheap" home NAS question [this is how I ended up here], when as jgreco has been pointed out, iX are now heading down a very different road with FreeNAS (and NAS4Free is possibly on a similar path)

There's a far bigger "problem" with the statement "standard PC hardware ". OpenZFS expects ECC-memory and has itself no memory checks, in openZFS there's no protection build in for everything that's in memory, typical several GB.
It can take months or even years before a memory "flip" gives problems, maybe never.

Those people that plan to buy "standard PC hardware" and visit the forum will hear in the forum (correctly) that this is a very bad idea. Those that don't visit the forums have one sentence in the manual that warns them for using non-ECC memory.

Some off those with standard PC hardware will lose their storage completely.

Do other systems use memory checks? or would they just fail more gracefully in the event of a memory error and not corrupt a whole storage array on the way down?
Either way maybe FreeNAS should make a big deal about it on first run and have a flashing "Non-ECC memory detected, do not use for production data, only testing" or something :)

 

[Knowltey]

Unfortunally that's not what on the FreeNAS website and thus the message from iXsystems. Some things from the FAQ :

"
3. What do I need to get started with FreeNAS?

To use FreeNAS, you'll need standard PC hardware with a 64-bit processor and at least 8GB of RAM, a 4GB USB Flash drive, and a FreeNAS installation file. Either write FreeNAS directly to the flash drive or boot the CD installer to have it done for you. Point your web browser at the IP address of the FreeNAS system and you're good to go! Read the FreeNAS Documentation for more information."

"
FreeNAS Recommended Hardware:

64-bit x86 Processor with at least four physical cores
8GB RAM
2GB Flash Drive for installation (use 4GB to be sure it's big enough)
At least two hard drives of the same model and capacity for storage
Wired network port (wireless not supported)
Computer on the same network with a modern web browser (for management)

FreeNAS Minimum Hardware:

64-bit x86 Processor
2GB RAM
2GB Flash Drive for installation (use 4GB to be sure it's big enough)
At least one additional disk for storage.
Wired network port (wireless not supported)
Computer on the same network with a modern web browser (for management)
"
They write "standard PC hardware"!
No ECC-ram or server-class hardware mentioned, rather the opposite.
Unfortunately OpenZFS expects server class hardware with at least ECC ram and "tested" components.

Well those specs are proably as such because of the UFS option instead of ZFS and you can indeed get away with running ZFS on a build just meeting the listed minimums there. You wouldn't want to be running ZFS on it though by any means.

And they likely don't mention ECC because yes you don't actually **require** it which is the key word in "system requirements". You don't need ECC, but that doesn't mean it's no less of a bad decision in a server.

 

[AlainD]

Well those specs are proably as such because of the UFS option instead of ZFS and you can indeed get away with running ZFS on a build just meeting the listed minimums there. You wouldn't want to be running ZFS on it though by any means.

And they likely don't mention ECC because yes you don't actually **require** it which is the key word in "system requirements". You don't need ECC, but that doesn't mean it's no less of a bad decision in a server.

The most part of the FAQ is not about requirements, but recommendations.
They don't even recommend ECC-ram and not a single mentioning of "server-class" hardware.
They off-course now the "odds" better than we. It could be that the risk off losing data with FreeNAS (as a software package) itself is far higher than the extra protection ECC gives.

At the moment almost all PC's run without ECC-ram and without much problems. Even the Google study about memory errors found them clustered.

However there's a big discrepant between the website and what is written on the forums. This is NOT good.

 

[wintermute000]

At the moment almost all PC's run without ECC-ram and without much problems. Even the Google study about memory errors found them clustered.

However there's a big discrepant between the website and what is written on the forums. This is NOT good.

almost all PCs do not run ZFS..... big difference....
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/

 

[Knowltey]

The most part of the FAQ is not about requirements, but recommendations.
They don't even recommend ECC-ram and not a single mentioning of "server-class" hardware.
They off-course now the "odds" better than we. It could be that the risk off losing data with FreeNAS (as a software package) itself is far higher than the extra protection ECC gives.

At the moment almost all PC's run without ECC-ram and without much problems. Even the Google study about memory errors found them clustered.

However there's a big discrepant between the website and what is written on the forums. This is NOT good.

almost all PCs do not run ZFS..... big difference....
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/

Heh, it's not even ZFS that is specifically the need for ECC, it's that it's a server. Servers should be running ECC. You need to be able to trust the data integrity on servers and ECC allows you to do that.

That and with how FreeNAS is designed to use all of the available RAM, not simply what it happens to use means that if you do have an issue with RAM you WILL encounter it. Most computer just use whatever RAM it needs at a time, so if the bad part of RAM is in a high section you may simply never encounter it. With FreeNAS if it's there you will hit it.

It's just like the recommendations don't say anything about having a backup of your data, but you'd be an idiot to not have that.

 

[cyberjock]

I think that iXsystems considers that "standard PC hardware " is enough and so I don't consider the FAQ as a bug.

You couldn't be more wrong.... iX doesn't consider "Standard PC hardware" enough. The real problem is they don't want to maintain the forums, FAQ, etc. They assume let the community do it, and guess who is responsible for maintaining the FAQ?

<hears crickets>

We *did* have someone that used to maintain the FAQ. He was also a moderator here in the forums too. But an iX employee went through one day and deleted what had taken him days and days of hard work to accumulate. He basically told everyone to f-off and left, never to return. The person that deleted the FAQ person knows what happened, and they deleted it because they planned to rewrite it to be better. The problem: they deleted it without replacing it.

Might be a good idea to not assume that iX "considers" something without them specifically saying so. You'll look like a fool because some of us *know* for a fact what they think of things. In fact, about the best you can argue with the conflicting information is that things are in flux.

Also, I'm not sure what "FAQ" you've been looking at, but I'm only aware of http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/FAQs and that says at the top that it's not maintained. It doesn't have your questions or answers either. Do you have a link to some other FAQ somewhere else?

 

[jgreco]

www.freenas.org -> about freenas -> faq

http://www.freenas.org/faq/

 

[Trif55]

I take it supermicro boards are a fave as they are server grade boards, support ECC ram and never go wrong? What would your thoughts be towards buying one second hand?