FreeNAS - should I?

[Chris Moore]

What's the harm in doing this?

If you accept all responsibility for any data loss or corruption due to not using any redundancy. You can use FreeNAS, and there are many great features in FreeNAS, but I don't want you to blame FreeNAS if a disk error causes data loss.

 

[Turgin]

You have to understand that your line of questions run so contrary to everything FreeNAS is built to do that even entertaining such thoughts are mental gymnastics that a lot of folks here can't or won't do.

Can you do what you're asking? Sure, as long as you know and accept the risk. However, I've heard the "I don't care about my data THAT much" before and it all goes out the window when the inevitable hardware failure causes data loss. Remember, people don't usually have backup issues; they have restore issues. I would rather incur the cost of basic redundancy than the time investment of having to go to backup just because one drive failed.

 

[rungekutta]

@muchgooder you don’t explain how your current setup is configured (in terms of redundancy etc)? In FreeNAS you could of course set up a bunch of different pools at the same time with different levels of redundancy for different types of data, eg a mirror for stuff that would be a pain in the ... to lose (pictures?) and stripes across disks, or several 1-disk pools, for scratch purposes. Just be mindful that if you stretch a pool across several disks without any redundancy then it only takes one disk to lose the whole pool, so makes it quite vulnerable.

That said, all of this will apply in exactly the same way irrespective of which NAS you choose, including Qnap, Synology, Open Media Vault, ... You are right that FreeNAS offers a bunch of useful features either way including snapshots, various monitoring and backup features, etc.

 

[muchgooder]

Can you do what you're asking? Sure, as long as you know and accept the risk. However, I've heard the "I don't care about my data THAT much" before and it all goes out the window when the inevitable hardware failure causes data loss. Remember, people don't usually have backup issues; they have restore issues. I would rather incur the cost of basic redundancy than the time investment of having to go to backup just because one drive failed.

Fair enough, although I still look at it as I would be using it differently than most people use it instead of what you think it was meant to do. I am just not using some features.

 

[muchgooder]

Thanks to everyone that replied - I greatly appreciate the responses. It's interesting in that I am a developer in my day job and I have a different way of approaching things. I get why the server guys feel the way that they do about redundancy - in the business world it has to be done at the hardware level. I probably should have better described my various levels of (somewhat manual) redundancy - it works for me and I never back myself into a corner. My drives WILL fail at some point and I'll have to restore a few gigs of data from my other local cloud or blue ray whenever I get around to it. To me that's just fine - I'd rather keep the simplicity. With that in mind I am going to give Open Media Vault a crack first.

 

[rungekutta]

@muchgooder I have never used Open Media Vault so slightly guessing... but on the surface it looks quite similar except baselined on Debian Linux instead of FreeBSD, and XFS or ext4 rather than ZFS... otherwise similar value proposition...?

This forum is very enterprise focussed and brings a wealth of collective experience in that area no doubt... which is worth a lot. But having said that, this is how iX puts it themselves on the front page of freenas.org:

“FreeNAS is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network. FreeNAS is the simplest way to create a centralized and easily accessible place for your data. Use FreeNAS with ZFS to protect, store, backup, all of your data. FreeNAS is used everywhere, for the home, small business, and the enterprise.”

Just sayin’. ;-)

What is the Open Media Vault community like?

 

[tfran1990]

Have you checked out Synology? That might be a simpler solution.

I wouldn't want to push anyone away from going with freenas, but if redundancy is not a very important to you, then there is many other paths to consider.