FreeNAS or buy a commercial product?

[GlitchBoy]

If I could trouble you for some opinions...

I really need to get a NAS solution for my home/home-office and after some research, I was nearly ready to order a QNAP TS-219P+ with two 2TB hard drives. But with a price tag of over $350 for the QNAP unit and money being very tight right now, I just couldn't pull the trigger.

Having successfully built two SmoothWall linux-based firewalls out of old PC's (which have been working great for several years now) I wondered if there was a similar solution to make an old PC into a NAS unit. After searching I found out about FreeNAS and initially it sounded like just the ticket.

However, the only old PCs I have available right now that I'd be willing to turn into a NAS unit are all P4's or less. Only one has SATA onboard. I know I could look into buying a used PC or used hardware and building a PC, but I think the cost of doing that is going to be $100+ dollars at least. If my cost starts getting too close to the TS-219 (which would have a warranty and would hopefully be easier to set up) then I'd have a hard time going w/ FreeNAS.

I guess what I'm wondering is, with FreeNAS can I build something equal (or better) than a unit like the QNAP TS-219 with a P4-based PC? Or is FreeNAS more likely to save me money if I was looking for a higher-end NAS that was going to cost me many hundreds (or thousands even) of dollars?

 

[Bohs Hansen]

if you need to do something with it right now, you should most likely take a look at FreeNAS .7. Its a bit more complete on the content for now, but 8 is coming along very nice if I may say so. About power, you should end up with more cpu power then the 219. If you are lucky you can shoot a cheap sata controller on ebay for 10$ and be settled.

When it comes to 1-2bay NAS and you'd have to buy all new, a prebuild usually is cheaper. On 4bay and higher there is lot to save on building it yourself and use a system like FreeNAS.

You could always just try FreeNAS on the system you got spare and see how it performs, then decided if its good enough and has the features you need. The last is prolly the most important, the features. Doesn't help to be cheap if it can't do what you need.

 

[GlitchBoy]

That is what I had surmised -- that the savings from going the FreeNAS route really didn't kick in until you got into the higher-end stuff. That has me thinking though -- right now a 2-drive system is more than adequate for me, however, if I want to add drives in the future, is that relatively easy with FreeNAS? If I bought a commercial 2-bay NAS and wanted to upgrade, I'd be buying a new device.

 

[Bohs Hansen]

I started with a 2bay prebuild, then bought another 1bay cause i couldnt afford a 4bay to replace the first. Now thats all full, I decided to build my own - should have done that from the start. I went for some really nice items and end up paying around 600usd (with 25% vat) for it. Cutting it back to just he essentials you're prolly down to 470-500. If you already have a case and a psu you can cut even more out of it. (And even less if you go with another board/cpu then the E350)
And now i got a 6bay unit with more power then prebuild about equal for 900usd.

If you just need a ftp/cifs/afp/nfs share to put your data on, you don't need much power. If you start to run webservers, download tools etc it starts to get more consuming. Special databases need some power to respond in a decent amount of time.
It all comes down to what you need .. do you need special VPN setups, iSCSI etc. The configuration is usually easier on the prebuild, but you can't fix much on it if it isn't to your liking.

As before, If i was you I'd just fire up that old P4 and install FreeNAS 0.7 on it and give it a go. Cost you nothing to try a test setup with some old hdd's. Just to see if it can perform for what you need.

 

[GlitchBoy]

I really would like to give it a try. But does FreeNAS move from one hardware setup to another with much ease? i.e. if I start with my old P4 and it has a hardware failure 6 months down the road, is my data gone? Or do I just build up another one, pop my data drives into it, and away I go?

 

[ohnename]

If your old P4 is broken, you just have to build another one, put your drive in there and import the ZFS pool.
A 64bit CPU is better for FreeNAS8, not all P4 are 64bit, only some Socket 775. All the socket 478 P4 are 32bit only.

 

[GlitchBoy]

When you say "put your drive in there", I assume you mean the data disks, right? FYI I'll be using a mirrored RAID arrangement.

I'd be going with version 7 for now.

 

[ohnename]

Yes, sorry for my poor english :p Just put your data drives in a new box.
Or in case you need your data immediately and you have a (Open-)Solaris/FreeBSD box at home you can use them for data recovery in case your FreeNAS Box is broken. Booth are supporting ZFS and import a pool is very simple (zpool import pool-name).

 

[GlitchBoy]

That's nice. It actually sounds like recovery from a hardware failure might be easier with FreeNAS vs. a commercial product. And that's really a key point for me because I plan on keeping very important, irreplaceable data on this device.

Can FreeNAS 7 back itself up to an external USB drive? I have been reading through the documentation and I'm not totally clear on this.

What I'd like to have is FreeNAS serving up the files live, but then have a USB connected SATA "toaster" that I can pop a hard drive in. What I'd do is have two hard drives for this and keep one loaded in the toaster and a second one in my car. Then every day I'd swap these two drives so I have a backup that's only a day old sitting in my car (in case of a disaster, like a fire). Possible?

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

The QNAP TS-219 is very powerful unit (compared to others in the same class) but with the P4 you'll have much more flexibility.

Adding new drives as as simple as installing them into the chassis, hooking them upto the motherboard / SATA addon card, and adding them to the ZFS pool.

The beauty about ZFS is that you can "migrate" it to any system, as long as the CPU architecture is the same. So if the P4 dies one day just replace the motherboard & CPU (stick with Intel to make it easier) and you can re-use the same data drives


For backing up the data, you can attach a external USB HDD to the NAS and backup your data to USB. Or you can backup to remote servers using SSH or FTP if you need to :)