For both home and business, so powerful!
January 31, 2018
For both home and business, so powerful!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with FreeNAS
FreeNAS is the central depot. Not only it is used as a file server (SMB/WebDAV), but also as a block storage for hypervisor (iSCSI), and many services provider (including usage of jail). I host many products on it like UrBackup and NextCloud.
Installed on a dual CPU 2U server with 16 front bays, I use a combination of SATA 3TB Drives and 240 GB SSD drives. The SSD Drives are used as a read cache, but also as a write cache (50 GB mirror).
ZFS is one of the most stable, reliable and fast file systems! Running over FreeBSD is very powerful. The community is awesome.
Installed on a dual CPU 2U server with 16 front bays, I use a combination of SATA 3TB Drives and 240 GB SSD drives. The SSD Drives are used as a read cache, but also as a write cache (50 GB mirror).
ZFS is one of the most stable, reliable and fast file systems! Running over FreeBSD is very powerful. The community is awesome.
Pros
- RAIDZ, fast and simple, and reliable.
- SSD Caching, for both Read and Write.
- Many services, from FileServer (FTP, SMB, WebDAV, ...), including iSCSI, and many other available using jail
- Powerful UI, easy to monitor, and manage.
- Awesome community, with many improvements every build.
Cons
- Deduplication. The deduplication uses so much RAM, and makes every write very slow. I have a very powerful server, with 128 GB of RAM, and when enabling deduplication, writes are 50% slower. Disaster. A Microsoft approach (cron job) using junction would be better, in my opinion...
- VMs. They have a module for VMs, but, it's a pain. Based on FreeBSD, they should do something to make it work... or provide some images. Tried to make a Windows Server VMs with many tutorials, and can't get it to work.
- Backup. It is very easy to use FreeNAS as a backup target, but when it's time to backup the FreeNAS itself... not that simple.
- Positive - Can be download for free, if you don't need support
- Negative - The paid support is basic, and requires next business day shipping
- Positive - Can work on almost any hardware
- Positive - Powerful caching, can have low latency high IOPS for almost any application using ship hardware
- Positive - Plugin market with ready to go apps, time saver
- QNap, Sinology, Netgear ReadyNAS, HPE StorageWorks, Dell Storage NX, Openfiler, TrueNAS, D-Link NAS and Western Digital My Cloud
If you are ready to build it yourself, FreeNAS is the best. I tried so many alternatives, including paid versions, and nothing compares to the power of FreeNAS. If you need an enterprise-grade NAS, you would go with an HPE or Dell because of the support, not the features. If you want a middle-range - QNap, Sinology, Netgear - they have an awesome product with powerful features, but you need to buy the hardware and software from them, with fewer options, and very basic support.
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