Should I use FreeNAS

[KyleBT]

I've been looking into FreeNAS and toying around with it a bit over the last while; I have a box running the latest release, but I have yet to move my existing data to the new box, as I've been trying to do as much learning as I can before hand. The more I research about FreeNAS, the less certain I am that it is what I need, and I was hoping someone with more experience running other NAS solutions might have some insight. I need a NAS for a small business, to hold all of our shared files, nothing over 1TB for the foreseeable future, and not likely more than 8 users accessing it. FreeNAS does look awesome, but it seems like overkill to me. I'm not even sure I would need ZFS; my thinking is that a simple mirror with regular off-site backup's would be adequate for our needs, and while ZFS is a powerful system, there's seems like a lot of complexities involved where it might not be necessary. If anyone knows of any alternatives I am open to hearing it. Thanks.

 

[kirkdickinson]

I have looked at Drobo and other NAS solutions. I currently have a file server that is overloaded.

Watch this it might be interesting:
http://geekbeat.tv/drobo-vs-qnap-vs-synology-vs-g-drive-and-more-which-storage-should-you-choose/

I am going to build a FreeNAS system soon.

 

[joeschmuck]

What you need to ask yourself is in your office environment what are your needs and it will help you choose your NAS solution.

1) Storage Size. If you think 1TB of storage is fine then you should at a minimum double it but you might consider at least around 4TB. And are you going to use the NAS to backup the office computers? That adds to your storage space.
2) How valuable your data is. This is where redundancy comes in play so that when one of the hard drives fails (it will), and you will hear terms like RAIDZ2 meaning two drives can fail and your data will still be in-tact.
3) Data Encryption. Most of us prefer to not use data encryption with FreeNAS and prefer to use an encryption scheme on the user machine vice the NAS.
4) How fast do you need your data which is located on the NAS? Will this be very fast access or are you just storing/archiving data?
5) How much money are you willing to spend? Remember that the cost of hard drives is the same no matter which NAS you purchase.

So once you can answer all these questions you will be able to evaluate the NAS products out there. Dollar for dollar a FreeNAS platform will give you more bang for your buck. One of the major advantages is being able to maximize your network throughput. The other advantage is cost. A disadvantage is the tech support really is the forums, but honestly if you create a good working document to cover operation and repairs, you are good. The forum folks are good at helping out.

Regardless of the NAS, always backup your important data to a second device, unless the NAS is your second device.

Good luck.

 

[KyleBT]

It's been a while since I originally posted this but...
Our current storage capacity is 2TB, and we don't use even 1/8 of that. I could go up to 2TB with the FreeNAS, but I really only see 1TB being necessary for the next number of years. How easily can I expand my capacity using ZFS from 1TB to 2TB later on? I know there can be issues with expanding your data pool, but I honestly can't recall what that is right now. I would like to run a 1TB raidz2, with the option to expand it to a 2TB raidz2 in the future, if that's possible.

My other "option" would be to use something other than FreeNAS and use a traditional file system, if there was a decent alternative, of which I am not aware.

 

[mattbbpl]

It's been a while since I originally posted this but...
Our current storage capacity is 2TB, and we don't use even 1/8 of that. I could go up to 2TB with the FreeNAS, but I really only see 1TB being necessary for the next number of years. How easily can I expand my capacity using ZFS from 1TB to 2TB later on? I know there can be issues with expanding your data pool, but I honestly can't recall what that is right now. I would like to run a 1TB raidz2, with the option to expand it to a 2TB raidz2 in the future, if that's possible.

My other "option" would be to use something other than FreeNAS and use a traditional file system, if there was a decent alternative, of which I am not aware.

Upgrading in those circumstances would be relatively simple. Simply swap out the 1 TB drives in your existing pool with 2 TB drives, one at a time, letting the system rebuild it's data parity before moving on to the next.

That's about as easy as it gets when parity is involved.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I know there can be issues with expanding your data pool, but I honestly can't recall what that is right now.

I expect you're remembering that you can't add drives to an existing vdev, unless that vdev is a mirror, in which case adding drives to it doesn't increase storage capacity. What you can do is add vdevs to a pool, or replace the drives in a vdev as pointed out by @mattbbpl.

If you don't need much storage, a 4-drive RAIDZ2 pool is a nice solution because you can build it from an inexpensive off-the-shelf 4-bay server, such as a Dell PowerEdge T20 or a Lenovo TS140. Then if you need more storage later, you only have to buy 4 new drives and replace the ones you have one at a time. An even simpler option is two drives in a mirror. To expand storage later, you can add another mirror, or replace each of the drives in the existing mirror.

 

[Nick2253]

Maybe if we can break down your concerns a bit, we can help you answer this.

First, you have a million options to make this work: you can use a Windows or Linux server, a dedicated NAS box (like Drobo), a DIY NAS like FreeNAS or Openfiler, or a combination. So don't feel stressed about picking the perfect solution: it doesn't exist. All you really need is a "good enough" solution to get you by. So, from that standpoint:

I need a NAS for a small business, to hold all of our shared files, nothing over 1TB for the foreseeable future, and not likely more than 8 users accessing it.

In other words, you need a very basic NAS, with a fairly small amount of storage. Honestly, any NAS solution will meet these requirements. Do you have other requirements, like AD integration, permission control, etc?

FreeNAS does look awesome, but it seems like overkill to me. I'm not even sure I would need ZFS; my thinking is that a simple mirror with regular off-site backup's would be adequate for our needs, and while ZFS is a powerful system, there's seems like a lot of complexities involved where it might not be necessary. If anyone knows of any alternatives I am open to hearing it. Thanks.

No one "needs" ZFS. What people "need" is high reliability with their data. ZFS is just one way to go about doing it. The biggest advantage to ZFS is that it protects your data from corruption and degradation on the drive, not just drive failure (which is all normal RAID protects from).

How important is your data? What happens to your business if that data is corrupted? How much down time can you afford? Answering those questions will get to the heart of your NAS needs (and ultimately, your backup needs too, but that's a different story).

Also, ZFS doesn't actually add that many complexities to the sysadmin. FreeNAS does a good job of configuring everything for you. The biggest complexity with ZFS, in my mind, is data recovery. ZFS data recovery is very costly, and usually not very successful. There are no easy tools for data recovery like with other file systems. However, that is balanced with the fact that the need for ZFS data recovery should be significantly less common, because it's more robust.

I could go up to 2TB with the FreeNAS, but I really only see 1TB being necessary for the next number of years. How easily can I expand my capacity using ZFS from 1TB to 2TB later on? I know there can be issues with expanding your data pool, but I honestly can't recall what that is right now. I would like to run a 1TB raidz2, with the option to expand it to a 2TB raidz2 in the future, if that's possible.

Data expansion in the way you describe is trivial with FreeNAS and ZFS. Moving from Xtb size drives to Ytb size drives is just plug-n-play. The challenge is expanding from X disks to X+1 disks.

When you say 1TB RAIDZ2, do you mean 4x1TB drives (giving 2TB usable space), or do you mean 4x500GB drives (giving 1TB usable space)?

---

At the end of the day, the biggest question that's unanswered is how important your data is to you. If your data is really important, then FreeNAS is probably the way to go. If it's not, then I'd go with something like a Drobo, stick in a mirrored pair, and call it a day.

At our company, our NASes are primarily used as working directories, or as central storage for files that rarely change. We don't use FreeNAS, and I wouldn't recommend that we do. If a file was corrupted, we keep 30 days worth of backups, so we can restore easily. If we lost a NAS, we might lose an hour or so of work, but we accept that risk as part of the cost trade off. Most of our important work is housed in our mainframe, and that's properly protected and very redundant. If we could, I would recommend that we use ZFS on that data system to give us an additional layer of security, but ZFS is incompatible with AIX.

Hopefully that helps you make an informed decision!

 

[Pheran]

It's been a while since I originally posted this but...
Our current storage capacity is 2TB, and we don't use even 1/8 of that. I could go up to 2TB with the FreeNAS, but I really only see 1TB being necessary for the next number of years. How easily can I expand my capacity using ZFS from 1TB to 2TB later on? I know there can be issues with expanding your data pool, but I honestly can't recall what that is right now. I would like to run a 1TB raidz2, with the option to expand it to a 2TB raidz2 in the future, if that's possible.

My other "option" would be to use something other than FreeNAS and use a traditional file system, if there was a decent alternative, of which I am not aware.

With such a small/simple storage requirement, I'd be inclined to just get something like a Synology DS215+ (or 415+ if you want the ability to add more drives later) and just slap in a pair of 2TB NAS drives in a mirrored/RAID1 configuration and be done with it. Of course make sure you have backups because RAID is not a substitute for a good backup. You won't get as much error correction as you would with ZFS, but it will certainly be less complicated.

 

[dairyengguy]

This is just my two cents; I had a Drobo 5N for the last 6 month and HATED it. It was slow, annoying, and constantly lost connection via SMB or NFS. I am thus far having much better luck with FreeNAS, but I have also heard that the Synology NAS units are pretty good.

 

[KyleBT]

Hey, thanks for all the replies folks. I have since continued with my FreeNAS deployment, and I now have my NAS up and running with 2 x 1TB drives in a simple mirror, I realize that this doesn't get me a lot of the benefits of ZFS, but it's really all I need. Our data isn't the end all be all, it can always be remade in case of a catastrophic error, but that's obviously not ideal. We basically work with Excel files and CAD drawings for a couple months, then need to keep them for regular reference for 6 months to a year, depending on the job. After that it's just archival storage for long term. We could survive with a day of down time, two at the most, for our current jobs.
Like I said before, I like the functionality of FreeNAS, and the web GUI makes most things pretty easy once it's all set up. I managed to fumble my way through the command line work that was required for install.
I used drives from 2 different manufacturers so there is less chance of them failing together. If I keep a drive on hand for replacement, or even have one available 2 days out max, I know my chances of total data loss are pretty slim from drive failure. My concern now is keeping an offsite back-up.
My new question is, and this might just require a new post, how do snapshots work? My understanding is that that if you have every snapshot you've ever taken you should be able to completely recover any file you've ever had on that system, and newer files would only require the respective newer snapshots. Most of our data is old data that doesn't get accessed at all, or very infrequently; maybe it's not worth even having that data on the same system, but I digress. As I understand it, you can only keep a snapshot on a system that has a ZFS file system, so it's not as simple as copying your snapshots to an external drive? Is there any simple way to do a local back-up to an external USB drive or what have you, that can then be pulled and kept off-site, either using snapshots or any other method? With only 1GB capacity on the server I'm not dealing with huge loads. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nick2253]

Snapshots are not exactly backups in the sense you mean. It's more like a differential between how the file system and data were at the time of the snapshot, and today.

For example, say I take a snapshot on Monday. As soon as I take my snapshot, it takes up only a trivial amount of space (i.e., the data delta between the snapshot and "right now" is really small). However, as I add, remove, and change files, my snapshot grows (i.e., the data delta between the snapshot and "right now" gets bigger), to allow me to get back to exactly how it was on Monday. If I add a file and then delete it after Monday, that really won't change my snapshot size, because the delta between Monday (when I didn't have the file) and right now (when I don't have the file) is zero.

This is why a snapshot retention policy is important. If you don't delete your old snapshots, they have the potential to get very, very large.

If you're trying to do offsite back-up, you might want to look at ZFS replication: you could set up a similar FreeNAS box, and then replicate the primary over to the secondary. If you're just trying to do file-level backups, then there are a lot of solutions. Using tools like rsync, or commercial tools like Acronis, would help you handle differentials/increments will more finesse, so you don't have to copy all your data to your backup every time.