Can FreeNAS be worth it for 2x4TB personal use?

[coingaroo]

Hi everyone, thanks for clicking on this post.

I am exploring my NAS options and I really like how FreeNAS offers ZFS support. I have several terabytes of documents, files, and media that I want to store in my own home, and know that the integrity is protected and all data is backed up. I'm aware that typical FreeNAS setups are pretty big, like 6 drives big with raidz-2 recommended, etc.

I am interested in just a 2x4TB setup in mirror mode. I already have both hard drives. I would also be syncing this data to Google Drive on a daily basis as my offsite backup. I would also be making monthly backups onto an external cold storage hard drive.

My use would be to mount this as a network share. I am also interested in writing and keeping notes with an app available on my iPhone. I am currently using a Synology DS220j however it doesn't have btrfs support, so that's why I am looking to get a new setup.

Appreciate your help!

 

[Samuel Tai]

Welcome! FreeNAS can absolutely be used for small-scale home use, and most of us here started off with small setups before gaining confidence to graduate to bigger systems. A single network share is well within the capabilities of your described setup. Just beware if your drives are using shingled magnetic recording (SMR). These aren't recommended due to their extremely slow write speeds and nondeterministic behavior in write-heavy environments.

 

[sretalla]

Mirrors are fine and as long as you follow the hardware recommendations (avoid Realtek NIC, use Intel NIC, generally don't use USB, use enough RAM), you can have a great experience with FreeNAS.

You might want to consider adding a small SSD for Jails (and system dataset to avoid writing to your spinning drives all the time) in addition to a boot SSD for everything to go smoothly for a number of years.

I see you will probably want to use nextcloud for the notes (unless you find a better alternative), so perhaps budget 12 or 16GB of RAM to ensure you get good performance with that jail. You don't need the latest generation hardware, so RAM (DDR3) could be cheap.

 

[subhuman]

You can also do 3-way mirrors. It wouldn't add a huge amount of expense, but would greatly increase your redundancy.