FreeNAS noob

[patseguin]

OK a few weeks about I started using XBMC and ripped about half my blurays and have about 1.8TB of data for that, about 3-4 in TV shows and then just a tiny amount of SD content. I have a homebuilt PC with 5x 3TB drives that I am going to let serve as a NAS. Over on XBMC I had people tell me to try unRAID and also to try FreeNAS. I've had nothing but problems with unRAID so here I am. FreeNAS was my 2nd choice because as I understand it, you cannot add to the array so you're basically screwed if you need more space. Is that true?

Also, does FreeNAS have all the extra crap of preclearing like unRAID does? Once I had my unRAID shares set up I dragged my MKV files to the RAID and was getting a whopping 30Mb/s on gigabit ethernet. It was estimating a day and a half to copy the files. I cancelled that and copied a bunch of the files to a spare hard drive and plugged it into the machine and copied and was going even slower at about 20Mb/s plus it froze mid copy on one file and I can't delete or overwrite it anymore.

I was previously running Windows 7 and had the drives in RAID10 on my motherboard controller (AMD 990FX). A single MKV file would take 2-3 minutes to copy whereas on unRAID it was estimating 2-3 hours.

What kind of performance and protection can I expect from FreeNAS? One of the users on XBMC is in love with ZFS and said it's perfect for serving media.

EDIT: This was brought to my attention. Will FreeNAS even run on my AMD Bulldozer CPU?

 

[survive]

Hi patseguin,

You can expand ZFS, just not by adding individual drives to it. This is a by-product of ZFS's enterprise roots where you don't add single drives, you add 10's or 100's of drives at a time. When you make a ZFS pool you actually make a "virtual device" out of your drives and the filesystem goes on top of the "vdev". Need to expand, just add another vdev. Ideally the new vdev will be similar in size & performance to the original vdev, so if your first vdev is 6 1TB 7200rpm drives in raidz your second one should be as well.

Re: bulldozer support:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?6053-Does-FreeNAS-support-AMD-FX-cpu-s

-Will