7 or 8 for basic file server?

[jrnaismith]

Hi All

I have no experience with FreeNas but plan on building a system for a friend with the following hardware

Fractal Design Array R2 300W SFX PSU Case
Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525-O Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz Motherboard
2 x Corsair CMSO2GX3M1A1333C9 2GB DDR3-1333 CL9-9-9-24 204PIN SODIMM Memory
2 x Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Drive (to begin with)
Patriot Xporter XT Boost PEF4GUSB 4GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (FreeNAS)

to perform as a basic file server for a media streaming Movie files and Music to 1 PC and 1 Mac running XBMC …no need for raid or redundancy ….would you recommend FreeNAS 7 or 8?

Thanks for any input

 

[marcusmarcus]

I'm running FreeNAS 8 as a file server to dish out movies and TV shows to my HTPC in my living room that is running XBMC. It works very nicely for that. I have a Atom D525 board as well, and the onboard NIC was not supported by FreeNAS 7, so I did not get to try it. I also have my desktop and netbook with Picasa pointing to my FreeNAS to work with pictures directly from the file server. Just check your and make sure your NIC is compatible and I think either version will work for basic file server.

 

[Durkatlon]

FreeNAS 8 will have better hardware support. For basic features it probably makes little difference. For advanced stuff and stability of the platform 7 is probably better. If you want to be on an upgradable path 8 would be best. Expect introduction of new stuff in 8 to be a slow drawn out process though.

 

[SnorreSelmer]

If you want to run a pure file-server then I recommend FreeNAS 8. It's the latest version which should get the best continued support.

ZFS is native to FreeBSD/FreeNAS 8 and you should get the bestfunctionality there. FreeBSD/FreeNAS 7 has ZFS support, but no guarantee how much effort will be put into its ZFS-implementation in the future.

I'm sure most of the streaming-services etc. in FreeNAS 7 will be available in FreeNAS 8 in the near future, rendering Freenas 7 more and more obsolete.