been holding off building my nas box way too long and wana move away from Drobos. so both freenas and unraid have got my attention. i did once build a freenas box with bits i had lying about was gob smacked at the speed compared to my drobos. but now i want to build my own i know both are diffrent in thier own ways but want to add storage over time to my nas box and was wondering which would be best suited? primarily will be storing my vast media collection, family photos music collection etc. what are peoples experiences with either?
This is going to be a terrible reply that doesn't help you in the slightest. I haven't used either of these but from what I have read unRaid is going to be the choice for my storage needs when I finally get round to sorting out my server setups properly. No other reason then I think it seems better. Now please wait for replies that are going to actually give some experienced response
I haven't tried unraid, but I didn't like freenas at all - it seemed overly fiddly and decidedly not noob friendly. OMV was OK, if a little fiddly - it kept losing the printer, meaning a few minutes pissing around every other week - but I haven't tried it on my Gen8, so it was at least six or seven months ago. I'm using XPEnology for the time being, because it's hassle-free - it's straightforward and simple to maintain.
I've an UnRaid 5.x box - free up to three drives, I think for 6 and up you need to pay regardless (ed- just checked, yup 30 day free trial $59 for up to six drives)? No experience with freenas. With no experience whatsoever in setting up a server or anything headless I had it working in less time than it took me to install the drives (HP microserver) it does nothing fancy, I use transmission occasionally, but generally it's just for storage of music, films/tv, photos, and an on-site backup of my design work and resources. I do the backup manually when I can remember, two or three times a month. As far as I understand it (not very) they've (LimeTech) gone mad (awesome) on virtualisation, so you can have any OS (and therefore any application) packaged within or operating from your UnRaid install...
Stupid question, but what advantage does any of these (freeNAS, UnRaid, XPEnology) have just running the box with a leftover Windows licence?
It entirely depends what you want to do with it; I don't know about all of the above but UnRaid gives you huge versatility on drive pooling, want to enlarge your array? Stick a drive in, allocate it, done - even if it's a different size. The only drive size rule is that the parity drive is as big or bigger than your largest data drive. You can have your data spread evenly across all the drives, or you can concentrate it in segments; for example, I'm not likely to listen to music and watch film/tv at the same time, so they're on the same drive pool - but I might want to backup or use resources/photo-edit while listening to music (or having buffy in a 2"x3" box in the top right of my screen while I work) so it makes sense that the backup etcetera is separate to music & film/tv... It only uses one parity drive (more if you get into huge arrays) for the whole array, which Is kind of cool. However, if you don't trust your parity to just one drive (one drive fails, new drive in, parity drive dies while rebuilding, all that data lost!) you can have a dual parity drive which statistically allows you to put yourself in a pretty bullet proof place - catastrophic event not withstanding. It allows multiple cache drives as warm spares, or actual caching to allow all sorts of sneaky things that can make your array feel much faster - with the risk that if something goes wrong while the data is cached before being written to the array that data is gone, as it isn't written to the parity drive. Oh and apparently you can now use them to install whole OS's on within the UnRaid environment... It runs headless and is accessed via the network or (if brave) via the internet at large, meaning you don't need a KVM switch, a second set of KVM's or to do the KVM shuffle every time you want/need to change something within the server. It has all sorts of cool plugins that I don't take advantage of because - reasons.
I've only used FreeNAS and been quite pleased with it. Helps if you have some *nix experience just to make sense of things like drive labels. Before someone says it, yes, I know FreeNAS is BSD based, not unix, but my point stands.
UnRAID does now support two drive parity in its latest update (6.2) I believe but you do have to buy a licence. Freenas has zfs support but you need ecc memory to take advantage of it, and it's free of course. Sent from my E5823 using Tapatalk
thanks for the info guys. having tried both yesterday and today using 2 pcs i amcurrently building for my friends. sustained transfer speeds on freenas is great. but im gonna go towards unraid despite having to pay for it. virtualisiton and some what easier setup and from what ive read easier to expand almost like drobo manner is whats made my mind up one of devs of unraid has some interesting youtube vids. can see my self doing the following for my steam and origin games.
