My First Look on FreeNAS

[TechAway]

Hi Folks , I decided to take off NAS4Free from my old desktop and push FreeNAS instead (8.3). It might be funny to most but I am kind of surprised to see that there is no option for me to keep the OS and the Data on the same Disk. Let me break it up in case it sounds confusing :

With Nas4Free It allowed me to put the OS and the Data on the Internal drive (ofcourse on diff partitions). Since I am working with a very very tight budget to build my lab I was happy , since my USB drive that I had used to install the OS could be taken off post installation , formatted and refitted again on the NAS box to use it as a storage.

With FreeNAS it seems I gotta sacrifice my USB Drive since even if I go ahead and run commands to put the OS files on the internal HDD , I will not be able to use it for Storage (atleast that's what i learnt from the documentation ) :( .....

As i said might sound funny to most of you but I feel a little cheated :) ... Let's see

 

[cyberjock]

Well, there's alot of things that make FreeNAS different from NAS4Free. If that's a big deal to you, you are welcome to stay with NAS4Free. There's lots of stuff I can do on FreeNAS that I can't do on NAS4Free because of the design of FreeNAS(which is also why you can't store data on the OS disk).

The design expectation was that you'd use a small 4GB+ USB stick. If you aren't okay with that expectation(which I consider to be a "hardware requirement" of sorts) then you are welcome to go back to NAS4Free.

The developers cannot make 100% of people happy 100% of the time, and the benefits of FreeNAS' design without using the OS disk far outweigh NAS4Free's design(in my opinion). If you disagree, that's okay. NAS4Free will still be there tomorrow if you want to switch back.

 

[jgreco]

Let me break it up in case it sounds confusing :

*tugs at grinch hat*

Yes, do "break it up" because we're all dense and we haven't entertained "discussions" by dozens of users over the last few years of why the appliance model FreeNAS uses is "broken" and they'd like to install it to a shared hard drive instead.

USB is cheap and USB ports are usually easy to come by; there are likely several unused on your system, both internally and externally. It seems unlikely you have to "sacrifice" your USB drive, just go get a cheap USB thumb drive.

 

[pirateghost]

I'm not really sure I understand why this is an issue for you. You shouldn't be installing to a hard drive anyway

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

 

[thelambentonion]

Installing your OS on your storage drives is just asking for trouble; if you must install your OS on a hard disk then it should be on an individual drive (eats a SATA port) and preferably in RAID1 (eats two SATA ports). USB flash is cheap (~$15/8 GB) and motherboards have a plethora of USB ports. If a FreeNAS install develops an issue, doesn't update properly, etc., then it's relatively painless to re-image a flash drive and import your storage pool (even easier if you back up your config files regularly). Additionally, if you keep a backup flash drive plugged in, then you just reboot your server, change the boot priority, and your NAS is back up with negligible downtime.

 

[Alfred Melvin]

Can't you just set up the boot order to search for the second USB if first one fails?

 

[jgreco]

That's a highly BIOS-dependent feature.