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FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS?
I would just urge people to think twice about using Unraid. It is a decent enough product and I have been using it for well over a year now, but I am concerned that the support of Unraid in the future is all but certain. There hasn't been an official release of Unraid in almost 2 years. The developer constantly promises a new release is around the corner, then you never hear from him for weeks or months at a time. I have completely lost faith in the developer of this software.
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(2012-11-09, 07:00)srj1209 Wrote: 5. BTW, did anyone try Windows8 as a media server? Doesn't it have similar capabilities as that of an unRaid?

Storage spaces in Windows 8 gives you more flexibility than found in Unraid but you still have striping when you use parity.

Windows Server Essentials 2012 offers a competitor to ZFS with "ReFS", but much more expensive than FreeNAS ($700 vs. $0).

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I've been using unraid for a few years now. It has been dead on solid. During this time I've had drives fail, changed MBs, cabinets, upgraded several times, expanded the array many times, and have even had it lose a drive during a upgrade. Never lost any data and it's been a great media storage system.

The developer's communication skills leave a bit to be desired. There have been many beta/RC releases since the last major release though. Unlike many softwares, these have been pretty solid. Anyone that has a concern about support should just call them up. Tom (owner) is very helpful and the support on the forum is about the best you'll get on the internet.
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(2012-11-12, 18:10)TugboatBill Wrote: I've been using unraid for a few years now. It has been dead on solid. During this time I've had drives fail, changed MBs, cabinets, upgraded several times, expanded the array many times, and have even had it lose a drive during a upgrade. Never lost any data and it's been a great media storage system.

The developer's communication skills leave a bit to be desired. There have been many beta/RC releases since the last major release though. Unlike many softwares, these have been pretty solid. Anyone that has a concern about support should just call them up. Tom (owner) is very helpful and the support on the forum is about the best you'll get on the internet.

+1 to that comment. I`m currently running v5.0 RC8a. I was a complete newbie to linux and NAS when I built my unRaid tower and have been running it for over a year now. All that I learnt in the process was all through the great and helpful community (forum) contributions. So I would say that it is safe to assume that unRaid is not unsupported or going away anytime soon.
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You might also give NexentaStor a look. It's what I'm looking at moving to since OpenSolaris is dead.ImageImageImageImageImage
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I am running Freenas with Raid-Z with 4TB (4 Drives, 8GB RAM), it's really fast and reliable when exchanging disks. The web interface gives you feedback when errors occurs, but you have to learn the zpool command line syntax to use it properly.
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I'm using OpenMediaVault. It's written by one of the FreeNAS devs and has pretty much the same feature set but is based on debian so it is easier to add extras such as tvheadend.
I was using UnRAID before and in my opinion OMV is superior in every way, and it is free.
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(2010-10-16, 15:44)beckstown Wrote: Your example is correct. But only because the largest drive is always used for parity. So if you have mismatched drives that are 1GB, 20GB, 500GB, 2TB you will have 521GB of storage (=sum from first three drives) and all of the data is backed up.

Just to point out, there is 1.5TB of wasted space in this setup. I really just can't imagine ever wanting to do this.

ZFS also lets you mount partitions as part of a vdev. It'll let you mount single files as well.

One of the areas that ZFS is still not very good at is reconfiguring Zpools without data loss in the event of not having someplace to back the data up first.

I can give an example. Let's say you've got a zpool, with one vdev in it which is a raidZ2 array of 6 x 1TB disks ie 4TB storage. And you want to add 4 x 1TB disks to it but you still want the double redundancy, you could add a new vdev to the zpool of raidZ2 4 x 1tb, only adding 2TB to your max storage, or you could add 2 new vdevs to the zpool of 2 x 1TB in in mirrors. Still only 2tb. But if you could back up the data first and 'destroy' the zpool, remove the current vdev, you could put them back in a single raidZ2 of 10 x 1tb giving you 8tb of storage with the same double redundancy.

There are other tricks to moving the data around using partitions, but it starts getting complicated. You could use the 4x1tb, each with 2 500gb partitions to back up the 4tb of data, then destroy the initial zpool, partition the original 6x1tb drives to 2x500gb partitions each, and move the data from the first partition on the 4 new drives to the 2nd partition on 4 of the old drives, then create a new zpool with 1vdev in raidz2 of 10x500gb partition1's, copy the data from the 8 (4new 4old) partition2's to the zpool, then destroy the partition2's and grow the zpool into the rest of the drives.

Yes this example is with matching sized drives, but that's for 'ease of understanding', 'best practices' prefer to keep vdevs of similar sized drives as well, but it's not entirely necessary. You could have 2x500gb 1x750gb and 1x1tb drive, and still utilize 1.5tb in single redundancy, by partitioning the 750gb drive to 500/250, and the 1tb drive to 500/250/250, put the middle 250gb partition in a mirror for single redundancy there, then the last 250gb would have no redundancy. That gives me a total of 1.75TB with single redundancy, and 250gb with no redundancy, for the 4 drives that in unraid appears to only give me the 1.75tb single redundancy with the 250gb wasted.

I find zfs to be somewhat more complex, but I'm willing to do a little more work with it to get some of the extra space/features.

Planning ahead helps.

My current storage is on my desktop computer 4x2tb drives in a JBOD setup. Recently (couple of months ago) lost a 3tb disk in this same setup. Took me a month to recover because I currently don't have the space to keep a backup copy around. I plan to alleviate this by upgrading the desktop to 2 4tb drives, building a nas which I'll probably run FreeNAS on, and building a zpool with 1vdev raidz1 using the 4x2tb drives. buy 8tb, end up with only 10tb total storage, but then I hope to keep upgrading the zpool, drop one of the 4tb in the desktop, put it in the nas as a replacement for one of the 2tb, and keep the 2tb as a spare, then upgrade the 4 2tb with 4tb each, and create a second zpool.

Incidentally one of the reasons I'm planning on going with zfs is I can get up to an obnoxious number of disks into it. By adding SAS expanders of JBOD via an external SAS port on the initial nas. SAS expanders can be daisy-chained.
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FreeNAS versus unRAID as the operating-system for a DIY NAS?0