Is FreeNAS for me?

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leonidas

Cadet
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May 28, 2011
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Hi guys,

I'm thinking of building a mini pc for storage, and someone recommended FreeNAS on another forum, over windows or linux.
I'v had a look thru the documentations, but still not 100% sure.

Can I actually use existing HD with data, I saw the import volume doc, I assume that's what it can do right?
Then if it can do that, it should be no problem mixing HD/file systems right?
ie: 2x NTFS, 2xZFS,

Also can it for example have:
1xNTFS 1xZFS - JBOD
2xZFS - Mirror setup
Giving me a total of 3 network volumes.

Finally can the system be accessed remotely, after initial setup.


Thanks,
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
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18,681
I don't expect FreeNAS will support that exactly. I haven't used import volume so I don't know for sure what it does, but it's more likely a tool to allow the integration of an existing supported filesystem on a disk.

You can probably work around that by backing everything up to a different disk and then restoring it. No fun, I know.

ZFS is really cool though. What you ideally do is you add all your disks to a single ZFS filesystem. You can then set up datasets within it; these are the things that your fileserver exports to clients. You can set parameters on a per-dataset basis. For example, if I stripe four 2TB HDD's together, I wind up with an 8TB ZFS filesystem, but then I can tell one dataset that I want two copies made of all data (in case a disk fails) and another that I just need one (because it's a temporary/scratchspace filesystem). I don't have to worry about sizing too much, since all space is available on a first-come, first-served basis to any dataset, unless I specifically reserve or limit space.

Some of this has to be done through command line edits at the moment, but it's insanely cool and very flexible. It separates the concept of what you're referring to as a "network volume" from the underlying hardware storage and instead ties it to administrative storage policies. If you need to add a disk someday to get more space, you just add it to ZFS and all your volumes suddenly have more space.

And it's FreeBSD, so yes, of course the system can be accessed remotely, if it's set up to allow it.
 
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