Re: Great article

Great article (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-22 12:21 (#27S)

Thanks for linking to that Ars article comparing the two NAS systems. I hadn't seen it and it's a good article. I just bought and set up a FreeNAS on ixSystems hardware. It was expensive but I don't regret it - the machine has tons of RAM and high bandwidth network cards and it runs at less than 35W, which is good enough for me. I'm still figuring out all the goodness of ZFS and the different plugins but despite my learning curve, it's at its heart a solid FreeBSD system I have full, root access to, and no worries that some crazy script is mining bitcoin on my hardware.

Re: Great article (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-23 02:56 (#27Z)

That review had quite an axe to grind against the new FreeNAS interface, among other things. Have you found it annoying or troublesome?

Their descriptions of difficulties in doing relatively simple things (AD/LDAP) had me thinking that the OpenMediaVault, mentioned in the commments, might be a better way to go. Only tradeoff might be going from ZFS to BTRFS.

Re: Great article (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-23 11:51 (#283)

He's definitely right that the interface isn't as clear or user friendly as it could be, but I'm also new to ZFS, RAIDZ, and the like, so I'm learning too. I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending this to a non-tech person. But I'd rather have a not-fully-baked GUI on top of a powerful BSD system with ZFS, snapshots, rsync backups, and the like, over a great GUI for a NAS that doesn't have as much functionality. The FreeNAS plug-in architecture (it's run by ixsystems, the guys who do PC-BSD, which has the same architecture) is really pretty awesome. In two or three clicks you can install a jail and a sickbeard, plex, or bittorrent plug in and have it up and running. I've also got volumes exported under NFS and Appleshare and more. You get FTP access, full Root access, and more. I think it's the way to go. Just for now, you've got to do some reading and learning - the interface is definitely headed in the right direction but not quite there yet.

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