Hello,
I'm a home user and for years now I've been happily using a Synology DS209 with a small 3TB JBOD.
Now that I'm finally running out of disk space I looked for an upgrade that would also support my existing disks which are still in good shape. I soon found out that compatibility was very limited for my models and the desired QNAP and Synology models lacked it altogether. The only vendor that officially supported them still was Netgear with their ReadyNAS series. That's where I read about BTRFS and CoW the first time and thus consequently also ran into ZFS and FreeNAS.
Originally I had planned to abandon any technical tinkering at home simply due to lack of time so I was still unsure if this was a valid alternative. What changed my mind is really a couple of things:
- I plan to use FreeNAS as it comes just like I did before with DSM so in the end I hope that this is just a different OS maintained by pros just like before
- While FreeNAS is not primarily for home environments and my storage is really tiny it's still very important data for me so (e.g. the family photos) I wanted the most reliable solution and between the two CoW file systems ZFS seems more stable to me so I opted for FreeNAS over Rockstor
- The HP Microserver Gen8 seems almost ideal for people with limited budget and costs no more than the NASes I had in mind but it's much more flexible
- I don't need any vendor provides apps for my use case
- I was disappointed with the long-term support of Synology and QNAP
So here I am :)
FreeNAS is already up and running and the first data has been transferred for testing purposes :)
The first impression is good albeit I already have the first challenges I plan to address after my upcoming vacation. The biggest challenge seems to be copying my data from that external HDD I used to backup my Synology DS209. Since so far I only set up a RAID1 of two 1.5TB HDDs this is more tricky than I had believed since I didn't really spent the proper time to investigate before I started (stupid, I know). I had simply believed I could access it easily and transfer parts of its content to datasets in my pool. Since this seems not an option (thanks to the format used by Synology and a missing file browser in FreeNAS) I set up an FTP server on the Synology, connected the external backup HDD and used wget on the FreeNAS sheel for now. Seems a good option but let's wait and see ...
In any case I look forward continuing to work on this and I'm confident it'll prove itself as the right decision in the end even if it costs me a bit of time.
Cheers,
Thorsten
I'm a home user and for years now I've been happily using a Synology DS209 with a small 3TB JBOD.
Now that I'm finally running out of disk space I looked for an upgrade that would also support my existing disks which are still in good shape. I soon found out that compatibility was very limited for my models and the desired QNAP and Synology models lacked it altogether. The only vendor that officially supported them still was Netgear with their ReadyNAS series. That's where I read about BTRFS and CoW the first time and thus consequently also ran into ZFS and FreeNAS.
Originally I had planned to abandon any technical tinkering at home simply due to lack of time so I was still unsure if this was a valid alternative. What changed my mind is really a couple of things:
- I plan to use FreeNAS as it comes just like I did before with DSM so in the end I hope that this is just a different OS maintained by pros just like before
- While FreeNAS is not primarily for home environments and my storage is really tiny it's still very important data for me so (e.g. the family photos) I wanted the most reliable solution and between the two CoW file systems ZFS seems more stable to me so I opted for FreeNAS over Rockstor
- The HP Microserver Gen8 seems almost ideal for people with limited budget and costs no more than the NASes I had in mind but it's much more flexible
- I don't need any vendor provides apps for my use case
- I was disappointed with the long-term support of Synology and QNAP
So here I am :)
FreeNAS is already up and running and the first data has been transferred for testing purposes :)
The first impression is good albeit I already have the first challenges I plan to address after my upcoming vacation. The biggest challenge seems to be copying my data from that external HDD I used to backup my Synology DS209. Since so far I only set up a RAID1 of two 1.5TB HDDs this is more tricky than I had believed since I didn't really spent the proper time to investigate before I started (stupid, I know). I had simply believed I could access it easily and transfer parts of its content to datasets in my pool. Since this seems not an option (thanks to the format used by Synology and a missing file browser in FreeNAS) I set up an FTP server on the Synology, connected the external backup HDD and used wget on the FreeNAS sheel for now. Seems a good option but let's wait and see ...
In any case I look forward continuing to work on this and I'm confident it'll prove itself as the right decision in the end even if it costs me a bit of time.
Cheers,
Thorsten
