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FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS?
Interesting developments in the past month for ZFS on Linux Big Grin

I am still happily running ZFS on my FreeNAS. I also run SAB, Couch Potato, and SickBeard with no issues...

In the future I may consider OpenIndiana, Solaris, or Linux (with ZFS). For now, FreeNAS meets all of my needs and I like running headless and controlling everything via WebGUI and SSH.
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darkscout,

Are you running Debian 6 or Ubuntu?

What are your thoughts on ZFS on Linux vs ZFS-FUSE?

I installed Squeeze with the kfreebsd kernel last night and ran into some problems, see here. Also not listed is a performance problem -- even with "native" ZFS in kFreeBSD, I was only seeing 70-80MB/sec which is a fraction of what I was seeing with mdadm and XFS.

I'm looking at abandoning kFreeBSD and going back to a normal kernel so I can get XBMC installed, but my concern of poor ZFS performance is mounting, especially if I run it on fuse... thoughts?

Obviously for normal operation I don't need killer read/write performance, but this box also serves as a backup/archival station for me, and not being able to even max out a gigabit nic is concerning.
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There's also:
http://kqstor.com/

Who have debs built for 10.10 and 10.04, 2.6.35-22-server, no compiling needed.

I'm running Debian 6. ZFS on Linux seems to have loading issues, so I'm checking out the kqstor solution which so far is much better.

IMHO, ZFS on Linux/KQ Stor solution is better because it's at version 28 where as Fuse is still at 23, iirc. It's also a kernel module.
Code:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `xbmc_%`.* TO 'xbmc'@'%';
IF you have a mysql problem, find one of the 4 dozen threads already open.
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This thread is long and im confused reading it. Which one is better suited for my needs?

What i need is a nas that can
1. Stream UPnP. DLNA is a plus but not required. Playing media from XBOX 360 or PS3 sucks anyway. I prefer XBMCWink
2. Im poor. Cheapest solution is preferred.
3. I only buy new hd when my storage is full. I dont want to buy all hd early on.
4. Able to transcode for console is nice, but not required.
5. Will be use by me and my small family. 3 concurrent user at most.

From what i read, the biggest deal breaker from freenas is that you must have the same hd for all hd. you cant mix and match hd with different hd capacity or model number.
I dont care about speed as long as it is enough for me and my family. 3 concurrent user.
My data is movie media. Not family photos and the like. So recovery and backup isnt required, although is nice.

I dont know what else is relevant for guys like me. If somebody could point out, that would be nice.

From what i see, unraid serve me best. what do you guys think?
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publicENEMY Wrote:This thread is long and im confused reading it. Which one is better suited for my needs?

What i need is a nas that can
1. Stream UPnP. DLNA is a plus but not required. Playing media from XBOX 360 or PS3 sucks anyway. I prefer XBMCWink
2. Im poor. Cheapest solution is preferred.
3. I only buy new hd when my storage is full. I dont want to buy all hd early on.
4. Able to transcode for console is nice, but not required.
5. Will be use by me and my small family. 3 concurrent user at most.

From what i read, the biggest deal breaker from freenas is that you must have the same hd for all hd. you cant mix and match hd with different hd capacity or model number.
I dont care about speed as long as it is enough for me and my family. 3 concurrent user.
My data is movie media. Not family photos and the like. So recovery and backup isnt required, although is nice.

I dont know what else is relevant for guys like me. If somebody could point out, that would be nice.

From what i see, unraid serve me best. what do you guys think?


IMO Unless you need some kind of data loss / recovery functionality don't bother with any of the RAIDish type offering, just use shares SMB or NFS shares from native linux of windows. For your upnp/dlna server use what ever you want, lots of free or paid options there.

If what you are concerned about is multiple volumes for your XMBC system, if you are in library mode and you have your sources set up it aggregates the volumes into a single view for you. So from a usability perspective it looks like one big volume of movies.

For example:

snippet from sources.xml showing 3 network volumes for Movies and 1 for TV
XBMC will aggregate all 3 sources as a single view of movies.

Code:
<source>
            <name>Movies Volume</name>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume 1/</path>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume/</path>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/Movies Volume2/</path>
        </source>
        <source>
            <name>TV Shows</name>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://smbuser:password@PC/TV/</path>
        </source>
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claypigeon Wrote:If what you are concerned about is multiple volumes for your XBMC system, if you are in library mode and you have your sources set up it aggregates the volumes into a single view for you. So from a usability perspective it looks like one big volume of movies.

xbmc does the job aggregating different sources into a library just fine - but you also have the option of doing the same on your NAS using unionfs, with the added bonus that other machines on your network just see one source.

I use ZFS on freenas now, but for many years quite happily had my own 'fake raid' setup (there's no raid and no redundancy though!)

I had multiple, independent disks that I used to ftp movies to, filling one up and then moving on to the next one.
I combined all the disks using unionfs and (because they were all movies for my network) set up a read only samba share:

mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-I/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-II/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-III/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
etc.

Worked great for my usage - Full bandwidth to the disk while reading/writing, and shows as a single volume share to the network. Redundancy wasn't hugely important to me obviously, losing a single disk loses you a single disk's worth of content (non-media 'important' files were simply rsync'd between disks.
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hazeh Wrote:xbmc does the job aggregating different sources into a library just fine - but you also have the option of doing the same on your NAS using unionfs, with the added bonus that other machines on your network just see one source.

I use ZFS on freenas now, but for many years quite happily had my own 'fake raid' setup (there's no raid and no redundancy though!)

I had multiple, independent disks that I used to ftp movies to, filling one up and then moving on to the next one.
I combined all the disks using unionfs and (because they were all movies for my network) set up a read only samba share:

mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-I/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-II/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
mount -t unionfs -o ro -o noatime /mnt/SATA-III/Movies/ /mnt/Movies/
etc.

Worked great for my usage - Full bandwidth to the disk while reading/writing, and shows as a single volume share to the network. Redundancy wasn't hugely important to me obviously, losing a single disk loses you a single disk's worth of content (non-media 'important' files were simply rsync'd between disks.

I concur, assuming seeing your content represented as a single volume external to xbmc of importance. I will also point out that the use of ZFS is independent of any RAID platform and can be installed as part of a *nix disto, so *inx include it such as BSD but other require it to be installed due to licencing requirements, so ZFS does not require a raid package, just an OS that can support the ZFS code base. Additionally PV spanning, up to 8EB, can be accomplished other ways such as LVM on 64 bit linux kernels.

Point being if one is just concerned about content aggregation within xbmc and data protection is not paramount, one just needs to point their sources.xml to the network shares or file systems that contain the content. No raid based NAS system is required, nor is any PV volume spanning technology such as ZFS or LVM.
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I plan on building my first NAS primarily for the use of streaming media over my home network.

Reading this thread has been extremely useful to me on weighing up the pros and cons of ZFS ( freenas ) vs Unraid.

I am no expert when it comes to networking and such but I feel as though the main drawcards to me and maybe to other casual / newcomers to NAS will look for when deciding between ZFS and Unraid is:

Unraid - Only spins up the drives you are using. Saves power and I guess extends the life of the HDD's.
In an extremely bad scenario where you lose the parity drive and a data drive, you are still able to access data off the other data drives.

ZFS - Bitrot corruption prevention. I find this to be the biggest drawcard. The fact that it can auto repair HDD's is the main reason I'd choose this storage system. I find ZFS ( freenas ) to be a more polished and refined NAS OS aswell.

Saying this though, I still am undecided as to which OS to choose as my NAS so I guess I shall keep reading!!
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ShinobiNinjai Wrote:I plan on building my first NAS primarily for the use of streaming media over my home network.

Reading this thread has been extremely useful to me on weighing up the pros and cons of ZFS ( freenas ) vs Unraid.

I am no expert when it comes to networking and such but I feel as though the main drawcards to me and maybe to other casual / newcomers to NAS will look for when deciding between ZFS and Unraid is:

Unraid - Only spins up the drives you are using. Saves power and I guess extends the life of the HDD's.
In an extremely bad scenario where you lose the parity drive and a data drive, you are still able to access data off the other data drives.

ZFS - Bitrot corruption prevention. I find this to be the biggest drawcard. The fact that it can auto repair HDD's is the main reason I'd choose this storage system. I find ZFS ( freenas ) to be a more polished and refined NAS OS aswell.

Saying this though, I still am undecided as to which OS to choose as my NAS so I guess I shall keep reading!!

Freenas also has the ability to spin down drives when not in use as well but it will be an entire array at a time and will spin up the entire array when accessed.

most people opt for unraid because of the ability to expand to more drives. you aren't exactly able to do this in freenas as you have to add more vdevs to a pool and it's not really the same thing.

I use freenas and I like it very much. i have it setup with 6x2TB drives in a raid Z2 array so I have plenty of space and security.

feel free to ask any questions.

PS freenas (ZFS mainly) does require better hardware to perform. I currently have 16GB of memory in mine. Big Grin
"PPC is too slow, your CPU has no balls to handle HD content." ~ Davilla
"Maybe it's a toaster. Who knows, but it has nothing to do with us." ~ Ned Scott
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Have you managed to install sabzbd and sickbeard onto your Freenas NAS?
This is the main criteria I am looking for. I have had no luck so far with freenas 0.73. I have read somewhere they are making it easier with a plugin package or something in upcoming 8.1
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ShinobiNinjai Wrote:Have you managed to install sabzbd and sickbeard onto your Freenas NAS?
This is the main criteria I am looking for. I have had no luck so far with freenas 0.73. I have read somewhere they are making it easier with a plugin package or something in upcoming 8.1

Yes I do have it running, it is still a bit of a hack at the moment but it's still simple enough.

Yes plugin support will be available in 8.2, which should be available in the upcoming months.

Here is the guide I used to install Sab, couch potato, and sick beard. The new multimedia builds of freeness include Firefly (iTunes server), transmission and various other utilities.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freena...15&t=11618
"PPC is too slow, your CPU has no balls to handle HD content." ~ Davilla
"Maybe it's a toaster. Who knows, but it has nothing to do with us." ~ Ned Scott
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Although it's not free, the next version of Windows (downloadable consumer preview) has excellent pooled storage capability. With this you can implement a Drobo-like share.
Keith

XBMC on Acer Revo, Windows 7.
ATV2.
Intel NUC, Windows 7
Gateway Laptop when traveling...
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According to user Gollumscave, whose posts I have followed in some threads and in PM, he ended up with "Ubuntu with ZFS-Fuse" after having gone through a few tests with FreeNAS (because of ZFS) and is now happily running this setup:

Quote:I have a system at the moment with 25 drives. They are all cheap 2Tbyte drives from WD. I have them running under Ubuntu Server and have installed ZFS-Fuse. They are setup as 2 sets of 10 drives running Raidz2, and 1 array of 5 drives running raidz.

More of his forum posts in this thread.
HTPC: LibreELEC 7 on Shuttle XS35GTv2 & Raspberry Pi 3
NAS: NAS4Free 2x 3TB Raid1
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I too look forward to setting up my NAS and it does seem to be a close race when weighing the pros and cons for both unRAID and free NAS. At this time I find my biggest obstacle the current price on HDD's Eek
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(2012-02-26, 06:05)lrusak Wrote:
ShinobiNinjai Wrote:I plan on building my first NAS primarily for the use of streaming media over my home network.

Reading this thread has been extremely useful to me on weighing up the pros and cons of ZFS ( freenas ) vs Unraid.

I am no expert when it comes to networking and such but I feel as though the main drawcards to me and maybe to other casual / newcomers to NAS will look for when deciding between ZFS and Unraid is:

Unraid - Only spins up the drives you are using. Saves power and I guess extends the life of the HDD's.
In an extremely bad scenario where you lose the parity drive and a data drive, you are still able to access data off the other data drives.

ZFS - Bitrot corruption prevention. I find this to be the biggest drawcard. The fact that it can auto repair HDD's is the main reason I'd choose this storage system. I find ZFS ( freenas ) to be a more polished and refined NAS OS aswell.

Saying this though, I still am undecided as to which OS to choose as my NAS so I guess I shall keep reading!!

Freenas also has the ability to spin down drives when not in use as well but it will be an entire array at a time and will spin up the entire array when accessed.

most people opt for unraid because of the ability to expand to more drives. you aren't exactly able to do this in freenas as you have to add more vdevs to a pool and it's not really the same thing.

I use freenas and I like it very much. i have it setup with 6x2TB drives in a raid Z2 array so I have plenty of space and security.

feel free to ask any questions.

PS freenas (ZFS mainly) does require better hardware to perform. I currently have 16GB of memory in mine. Big Grin

Hope you can help me with this scenario -
1. I would like to start my media server initially with a 2TB drive and Freenas with ZFS but will not implement any Raid solution (obviously).
2. As I keep filling up my HD, I will buy which ever drive I can get at a cheap price.
3. As I add multiple HDs, I would like to use the unionfs command to present all drives as a single volume.
4. If at some point I feel that my collection of movies and songs is important, how difficult will it be to convert that bunch of HDs to a raid1 solution or even a unRaid solution? Am I violating the basic concepts of raid?
5. BTW, did anyone try Windows8 as a media server? Doesn't it have similar capabilities as that of an unRaid?

Any suggestions, solutions and even education short of retorts, are appreciated and welcomed. Big Grin
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FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS?0