# FreeNAS



## MartinD (Mar 26, 2014)

Has anyone used FreeNAS in a small office type environment?

Thinking of giving it a go for a deployment that I'm helping out with (someone getting a new office etc) and, having not used it before, wondered what peoples thoughts were?


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## mikho (Mar 26, 2014)

If I remember correct there is a 2 TB limit on the free version.


Also depends on what features you are looking for, if it's for a simple NFS/CIFS share then it's ok.


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## TruvisT (Mar 26, 2014)

HP MicroServer + FreeNAS = #WIN

We use this setup in small businesses all the time when a dedicated NAS device is not used or preferred. The options are simple and the ACL and other advanced options are great.

Won't bother listing the pros of FreeNAS as you can read about them, but comparing it next to other dedicated NAS devices, you have more control and options. For example when you run a HUGE setup like what we do for some clients where we image/clone all the business machines nightly or weekly depending on the case so that if a drive fails or an update crashes the machine, we can bring them up in under an hour, and having more RAID options to pick from like ZFS for example can really be great to prevent data corruption if you also keep backup of important documents for years and never touch them.

Yes, that was a big huge run on sentence.


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## MartinD (Mar 26, 2014)

Yeah, pretty much. That and scheduled backups and similar bits. Really nothing fancy.


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## dano (Mar 26, 2014)

I have used it in small office environments and other environments for awhile. I personally think freenas needs plenty of memory if your doing or planning on using deduplication(otherwise not as much), and would recommend using enterprise drives, as I have personally had lots of issues using cheap desktop drives with lots of IO from nfs/cifs shares, with panics that required hard resets.


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## Eased (Mar 26, 2014)

I had better luck with Nas4Free, personally. Basically the same thing as FreeNas only without the fluffy UI.


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## MartinD (Mar 26, 2014)

The plan is to use a Microserver. Not sure on the drives yet but prolly go with greens or maybe seagates.


It literally is just for storage so everyone in the office can access the files and then for user storage and the ability to generate backups/snapshots.


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## TruvisT (Mar 26, 2014)

MartinD said:


> The plan is to use a Microserver. Not sure on the drives yet but prolly go with greens or maybe seagates.
> 
> It literally is just for storage so everyone in the office can access the files and then for user storage and the ability to generate backups/snapshots.


Go with WD REDS or a NAS/RAID based drive if you plan to run RAID or want reliability in the storage. It's not a big big deal but if you read into the fine details, terms like ERC (Error Recovery Control), CCTL (Command Completion Time Limit), and TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) and some others will come up depending on the drive manufacture.
I've done desktop drives in FreeNAS for fun but I wouldn't trust them in production.


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## MartinD (Mar 26, 2014)

Preaching to the choir there


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## TruvisT (Mar 26, 2014)

MartinD said:


> Preaching to the choir there


True, true. But there are always those who come in from Google searching and now they will leave learning something and a community/thread hopefully bookmarked


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## blergh (Mar 26, 2014)

Haven't used freenas in years and years, i just remember the whole shitstorm that came down when some asshat decided to fork it and use Debian as a base instead.

Assuming it's still based on FreeBSD with ZFS it should be pretty straight-forward, go use it!


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## tchen (Mar 26, 2014)

There's no 2TB limit.


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## KuJoe (Mar 26, 2014)

Just go with Synology. Cheaper hardware and costs less than $10/year in power.


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## MartinD (Mar 26, 2014)

Not cheaper at all Joe lol


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## dano (Mar 26, 2014)

We had been using WD Black drives, and had fine performance and not a single issue during high IO(for a couple of years) -- when we moved to 3tb Seagate Constellation disks on our platform, nothing but problems. If you have a caching device, you maybe able to get around the issues we saw, but I would just stick with good, proven disks for ZFS arrays, like others have said, red drives, black drives work fine, Seagate disks from that family I wouldn't trust personally.


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## KuJoe (Mar 26, 2014)

MartinD said:


> Not cheaper at all Joe lol


All of the HP Microservers I've seen are at least $350.


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## dano (Mar 26, 2014)

Just checked the specs on the Microserver from HP -- for me, I have concerns for you with the latest FreeNAS versions, as it's such a memory eater, compared. We have 16gb of mem and dual L5420s on the machine I have talked about, and with versions 8.x-8.2 of Freenas,  we had no memory issues. Once we switched to 8.3, memory usage went from 8-10gb used, to all 16gb used - upgrading to version 9 was the same story(no dedup at this point). 

With the HP Microserver only able to handle 8gb of Mem, I would say to leave dedup disabled, and also to think about using a slightly older version of Freenas, or possibly even another distro at this point. I understand your machine will be newer than my situation, but it's still going to be running tight on resources, especially in a multi terabyte system.


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## TruvisT (Mar 26, 2014)

dano said:


> Just checked the specs on the Microserver from HP -- for me, I have concerns for you with the latest FreeNAS versions, as it's such a memory eater, compared. We have 16gb of mem and dual L5420s on the machine I have talked about, and with versions 8.x-8.2 of Freenas,  we had no memory issues. Once we switched to 8.3, memory usage went from 8-10gb used, to all 16gb used - upgrading to version 9 was the same story(no dedup at this point).
> 
> With the HP Microserver only able to handle 8gb of Mem, I would say to leave dedup disabled, and also to think about using a slightly older version of Freenas, or possibly even another distro at this point. I understand your machine will be newer than my situation, but it's still going to be running tight on resources, especially in a multi terabyte system.


You can do 16GB RAM in the HP Micro servers but requires BIOS patching in some cases.


KuJoe said:


> All of the HP Microservers I've seen are at least $350.


Newegg every now and again will let you grab them for around $250-280 and throw in a free 2TB drive. =)


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## notFound (Mar 27, 2014)

MartinD said:


> The plan is to use a Microserver. Not sure on the drives yet but prolly go with *greens *or maybe seagates.
> 
> 
> It literally is just for storage so everyone in the office can access the files and then for user storage and the ability to generate backups/snapshots.


Never, ever. Wouldn't trust it on anything, they die very easy and that auto power-off is very annoying and the only way to bypass is a script to read write to the disk every so often which is stupid.


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## tchen (Mar 27, 2014)

notFound said:


> Never, ever. Wouldn't trust it on anything, they die very easy and that auto power-off is very annoying and the only way to bypass is a script to read write to the disk every so often which is stupid.


Did wdidle3 stop working on the new batches?


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## mikho (Mar 27, 2014)

I have 4 green in my ml110 and had so for 2-3 years. Never any problems. The spin-downs are boring however.


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## tchen (Mar 27, 2014)

tchen said:


> Did wdidle3 stop working on the new batches?


Replying to my own question:  No, they still work.

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/western-digital-green-drives-wdidle3-exe.18156/



> You should now be able to run WDIDLE3 on all green western digital drives.. I chose to disable my timer as the drives sleep according to FreeNAS after 5 minutes (these are no longer media drives etc)
> If you are looking for a tool to modify WD RED idle timer please see Western Digital's new tool located here..http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en


IIRC, 5 mins was the max.  Some drives did not let you fully disable the head parking so that's the best you can do.


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## pcan (Mar 27, 2014)

My thoughts about the OS:
FreeNAS is a great solution if you (a computer professional) will do the management and keep a watchful eye over the machine. Should the server be "managed" from the typical Windows power user, I would certainly choose Windows server instead (the low-cost version, eventually). Windows server has many safeguards that prevents the would-be administrator from shooting on its foots; basic issues such as the user directory and security are working satisfactorily with the defaults. The Windows 8 built-in file history and offline folders are simple to use and they make a good enough backup system for most people. There are many auxiliary features that could be useful in a small office.


About the hardware:
I have bought a dozen microservers for the company where I work and I use one at home myself. They are a really good cheap server, but aren't such a great enterprise server. I would rather avoid them, if the budget is at least decent. Microserver's CPU is weak and the hardware quality is... well, not the best in town.
On small offices I preferentially use machines with dual power supply. People can exchange a faulty UPS without service disruption, and a clueless user will not disconnect both power cords when it needs to connect the phone charger to the wall outlet ,-) If this option is not available, I lately specify the Dell T20 (the xeon model, with ECC RAM).


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## Everyday (Mar 27, 2014)

I've used it to replicate from an office to an off site location. It works very well. Like any server, if you set it up with SSD or SAS drives the performance is above average and the interface is simple to use. In fact, I use it at my house as a home server and replicate to the data center just to keep a copy safe.


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## MartinD (Mar 27, 2014)

Is this FreeNAS you're talking about?


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## leto12 (Apr 1, 2014)

Hello,

yes i use it at a dell optiplex 780 to have a NAS and it's work great


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