Why did you choose freenas over nas4free?

[Storms]

Once i receive the 2 x 2TB drives I've ordered i'm gonna pull the plug on my nas box and rebuild it.

I'm contemplating jumping ship to NAS4Free; primarily because I only use my machine as a NAS and Ive been led to believe that FreeNAS has a whole host of bells and whistles where as NAS4Free is pretty much just a NAS.

Anyway, I'd be interested to know why you chose FreeNas over Nas4Free (or vice versa)?

 

[anodos]

Once i receive the 2 x 2TB drives I've ordered i'm gonna pull the plug on my nas box and rebuild it.

I'm contemplating jumping ship to NAS4Free; primarily because I only use my machine as a NAS and Ive been led to believe that FreeNAS has a whole host of bells and whistles where as NAS4Free is pretty much just a NAS.

Anyway, I'd be interested to know why you chose FreeNas over Nas4Free (or vice versa)?

List your hardware specs. That may be a better guide to what you should use than people's personal preference.

 

[danb35]

I'm contemplating jumping ship to NAS4Free; primarily because I only use my machine as a NAS and Ive been led to believe that FreeNAS has a whole host of bells and whistles where as NAS4Free is pretty much just a NAS.

What you've been led to believe in this regard is incorrect. FreeNAS is "pretty much just a NAS". It allows the use of jails, through which you can install any BSD-compatible software you wish. It also makes available some packaged software for you to install in jails if you choose (the plugins). But neither of these are part of the core software. NAS4Free, by contrast, integrates a number of feaures (like UPnP, DAAP, bittorrent, and a web server) which I would consider well beyond "just a NAS" (see http://www.nas4free.org/index.php?id=3 for their features list). It's not clear to me from that page (and I'm not sufficiently interested to dig further) whether NAS4Free supports jails and plugins.

In my case, honestly, the decision was made in ignorance. I'd been using FreeNAS 0.7something and subsequently upgraded to FreeNAS 8. It wasn't until some time later that I learned that the old FreeNAS code base had been continued with NAS4Free.

 

[Storms]

List your hardware specs. That may be a better guide to what you should use than people's personal preference.

not sure what you're getting at.... the hardware is compatible with both distributions. Therefore it doesn't even come into the equation. In any case these are my hardware specs; lets see if you have a valid point.
12 GB DDR3 Ram (will probably upgrade to 24GB in the near future)
5 x 2TB drives

also I'm interested in discussing why people made the choice... not sure why you're objecting to the topic of the thread. It's just a discussion.

 

[anodos]

not sure what you're getting at.... the hardware is compatible with both distributions. Therefore it doesn't even come into the equation. In any case these are my hardware specs; lets see if you have a valid point.
12 GB DDR3 Ram (will probably upgrade to 24GB in the near future)
5 x 2TB drives

Sometimes people come to FreeNAS with hardware inappropriate for running ZFS. UFS support is going away in FreeNAS, but will probably remain in NAS4Free. Depending on your situation, the availability of paid commercial / vender support is a big point in favor of FreeNAS. What are the specific bells and whistles in FreeNAS that concern you?

 

[Storms]

Sometimes people come to FreeNAS with hardware inappropriate for running ZFS. UFS support is going away in FreeNAS, but will probably remain in NAS4Free. Depending on your situation, the availability of paid commercial / vender support is a big point in favor of FreeNAS. What are the specific bells and whistles in FreeNAS that concern you?

I didnt say anything concerns me, just said that I'd been led to believe that freeNas had more bloatware

From the tone of your posts you seem to be taking this personally... kinda like a freenas diehard fan.

Answer me one simple question; then i will tell you my concerns. Why did you choose FreeNas over Nas4Free?

 

[anodos]

I didnt say anything concerns me, just said that I'd been led to believe that freeNas had more bloatware

From the tone of your posts you seem to be taking this personally... kinda like a freenas diehard fan.

Answer me one simple question; then i will tell you my concerns. Why did you choose FreeNas over Nas4Free?

I'm actually not a diehard. Tone doesn't translate well to written media. I just try to keep responses short. I use FreeNAS as samba servers in professional environment. It's easier to promote things to management if there is an identifiable company or vendor behind a product. Paid support contracts are also a big plus.

Please explain what you mean by 'bloatware'? When I think of bloatware I think of Symantec trials and random stuff from hardware OEMs. Most of the features of FreeNAS are just FreeBSD features exposed by a GUI (like jails), or features of software packages on all NAS software (like samba). I mean - they manage to fit the whole thing on a USB stick, how is that bloated? :)

 

[gpsguy]

I chose FreeNAS based on community support. Back in the BC (before cyberjock) @ProtoSD was a prolific supporter on the forum. He also had a treasure trove of helpful information on Blogspot. Unfortunately he took down those resources shortly before his departure from the forums.


Sent from my phone

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS itself is pretty lean and mean. There is definitely tons of features that could increase the required hardware resources if you choose to enable those services/features. But if you choose not to use those services then it's nothing gained and nothing lost.

NAS4Free has different hardware requirements because the design of the OS is different. NAS4Free runs from the boot device directly while FreeNAS boots into ram disks and uses those for logging and such. Much of that has been moved to the zpool, but the ram disks are still needed because USBs aren't rockstars when it comes to high throughput and low latency.

If you actually believe that NAS4Free is a better product for you, feel free to use it. It's totally your choice since you *are* trusting your data to the developers of the product.

I chose FreeNAS over NAS4Free because there was nothing but crickets and dumbasses answering questions in the NAS4Free forums. For example a user would complain that their zpool had a problem and the solution was to run a fsck. Anyone with 1/2 a brain knows there is no fsck for ZFS. Most questions went unanswered there too. By contract almost 100% of questions are answered here, although you might not like the manner in which the answer is presented and you may not even like the answer. But that's the breaks if you want a free OS.

 

[Storms]

I'm actually not a diehard. Tone doesn't translate well to written media. I just try to keep responses short. I use FreeNAS as samba servers in professional environment. It's easier to promote things to management if there is an identifiable company or vendor behind a product. Paid support contracts are also a big plus.

Please explain what you mean by 'bloatware'? When I think of bloatware I think of Symantec trials and random stuff from hardware OEMs. Most of the features of FreeNAS are just FreeBSD features exposed by a GUI (like jails), or features of software packages on all NAS software (like samba). I mean - they manage to fit the whole thing on a USB stick, how is that bloated? :)

OK I take your point... maybe it isn't bloated,

However, I think the big selling point of NAS4Free is that it uses a more up to date version of freeBsd. This means better security, performance, stability, more command line options, etc

 

[mjws00]

I think you need to find the feature set, and community you are comfortable in. I put pretty much every decent storage platform through the wringer, but I have a bias for what will potentially work for my clients in addition to personal use. Commercial adoption and development are important indicators of what may scale well and helps mitigate risk. The platform MUST have sufficient development resources to grow and change with new hardware and technologies. Sometimes OSS software with only a handful of devs lag, or die. It isn't easy to judge that strength on Nas4Free, it is simple on FreeNAS and other platforms.

Interestingly for me Samba and potential as a DC was a primary hook. Active devs and commercial backing so I can scale is another. If you spend much time in this community you find there are some brilliant folks, whom I enjoy hanging out with.

My intent initially was to swap in FreeNAS and consolidate some servers. Unfortunately that requires virtualization, and strong DC services for my use case. It's just a little too bleeding edge for me at this point. So I'm not comfortable yet with FreeNAS in that role. But in the meantime it got me hooked on ZFS and involved with a great software package.

 

[danb35]

never mind.

 

[Mlovelace]

I have tried 13 other software defined storage solutions and decided on freeNAS because of the active development and commercial support (if you need it). Look around and see what fits your needs

 

[Storms]

never mind.

i would really like to hear your opinion; please share. Especially if you'd like to counter the 'NAS4Free uses a more up to date version of FreeBsd and is therefore more secure and stable' argument,

 

[anodos]

OK I take your point... maybe it isn't bloated,

However, I think the big selling point of NAS4Free is that it uses a more up to date version of freeBsd. This means better security, performance, stability, more command line options, etc

Security fixes are incorporated into FreeNAS. Look at the release notes. Also FreeNAS 9.3 will be released soon.

Note that if you look up the FreeBSD release engineering team you will see several FreeNAS developers. I think they know what they're doing. :)

 

[jgreco]

there was nothing but crickets and dumbasses answering questions in the NAS4Free forums.

... and that's different here, how? ;-) ...

 

[anodos]

... and that's different here, how? ;-) ...

We don't have the crickets. ;)

 

[jgreco]

My bad, those are cockroaches.

 

[anodos]

My bad, those are cockroaches.

Nope, those are trolls. Lots of them. But very small and fast. It's an honest mistake.

 

[Storms]

I posted the same question on the nas4free forum, some quite informative replies
http://forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=7626

One thing is true that we all can agree on. The Nas4Free users really do make an informed choice between FreeNas and Nas4Free.

Most of the FreeNas Users just use it because it was the first hit in google, and many probably don't even know about Nas4Free (I also fall into this bracket). And when they do find out about it it's too late to change because it's a big headache to switch once you've got any significant data.

Im going to make a decision today as I intend to rebuild my box tomorrow (if the additional drives arrive)