Should FreeNas develop a Fork???

[Al Slitter]

I decided to open this discussion after I viewed a PDF file explaining aspects of FreeNas and then going into the hardware requirements of FreeNas and finally future developments. I apologize that I do not have the link to this text however I will try and give you the points that stuck as areas of concern.

First off about my system and requirements. I have a new FreeNas system that I build myself, all the hardware is new with the purpose of storing movies for my HTPC. I presently have an SSD for booting my HTPC and a 2-TB WD Red Hard drive to store the movies. I have a 1GB Ethernet network that connects my HTPC to my primary workstation. I maintain a back up of the movies on a 4TB Hard disk that I remove from my workstation as a back up.
I decided to build my NAS as I was intrigued by ZFS with the Read on Write feature as well as the use of Jails.
My new server has a Asus logic board, 16GB of Non-ECC Ram and 3-2TB WD Red hard drives.

The article brought up a few concerns with the primary one being elimination of ZFS1 (RAID 5) and the future elimination of ZFS2 (RAID 6). As a home user this is a major issue to me as I want to have the server with a small foot print and a low cost profile however I can see in the future that I would have to accept the minimum RAID configuration of 5 hard drives with three of these drive for parity.
It is wonderful to have a commercial company ( iXsystems ) play such an important role in the development of FreeNas. It is obvious that the growth of FreeNas is aimed at the commercial market as that is how iXsystems makes a profit and that is fine with me.
My question then is this: Is it time now for FreeNas to develop a fork in the distribution, one aimed at the commercial market the other aimed at the home user or small business user.

I would appreciate others thoughts.

 

[gpsguy]

I don't see the need for a new fork.

You are welcome to take your knife ;-) and join the NAS4free crowd (www.nas4free.org). It was the original "FreeNAS". iXsystems bought the name and developed what became FreeNAS 8.x, 9.x.

It would be helpful to know what article you read. There is a lot of misinformation about FreeNAS on the internet.

iXsystems already has a commercial product (TrueNAS) that they sell with their hardware. While FreeNAS doesn't have all the bells and whistles, they do give away a product that can be used by anyone.

 

[Jailer]

They already have the two forks you describe. TrueNAS is the commercial product aimed at the enterprise sector. FreeNAS is the free offering for SOHO use.

 

[pirateghost]

Freenas is already the home edition.....

 

[Mirfster]

Agree with what gpsguy stated. There are other flavors out there and others can "roll their own" if so inclined.

 

[nightshade00013]

To go a little above and beyond I don't even think the people at iXsystems will have control over zfs to the point of cutting out raidZ1 or raidZ2, that would be controlled by the openZFS development consortium. The article could be speaking more about Oracle on that aspect but any decision they make would not trickle down to us any time in the near future since they took ZFS to closed source.

I also have to agree that if you want to use older and less ZFS friendly hardware Nas4Free is already there and should cover your concerns.

 

[Al Slitter]

I new that I would draw some negative comments because of this post, however I felt it important to lay this out as a home user of FreeNas.
I still believe in ZFS and what it is able to do and FreeNas as the best platform. It is my wish to stay with this product now and in the future
however the article caused me to question where the future lies.
OK, regarding the article it was written by a member here called "cyberjock", the link to the page is:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

The document that I read is the PowerPoint version.

Thank you all for the comments.

 

[nightshade00013]

What you are referencing that refers to raidZ1 being a bad choice is due to the increase in drive size. When a drive gets so large that you are more likely to encounter an unrecoverable read error and be unable to rebuild due to said error your will have a pool failure when trying to rebuild. I can't remember the exact numbers but basically once you go beyond 1TB drives you are much more likely to have a second drive encounter an error while trying to resilver if you already had one drive fail. So if you go beyond a 1TB drive raidZ2 is going to be almost necessary to keep your data safe during a rebuild. And start looking through people's signatures and you will see multiple links to the reason why raidZ1 is considered dead.

As drives grow in size EVENTUALLY even raidZ3 will not be sufficient to correct a problem due to an unrecoverable error during a rebuild but that is much less likely than a raidZ1 in the same drive size.

The reason why ECC ram is important to ZFS is due to all the calculations that happen in ram and the storage of the data in ram before it is written to the pool, it's a subject that has been beat to death either way. But simply put if using non-ECC ram puts your data at risk and the cost difference is minimal is the data you have saved on your FreeNAS worth the risk. As a home user if your family photo's and documents are important to you skip a couple meals out expensive coffee's or a few pack of smokes, beers, etc. so you can keep that data from having a chance of becoming corrupted in ram. The same goes for buying just one more drive to have a raidZ2 with 4TB drives instead of a raidZ1. I am personally going beyond that and hitting raidZ3 since I will eventually have two vDev's and hate the thought of losing the pool to something I could prevent.

I hope that I am not coming off confrontational or rude on this but to me right now it boils down to taking something that has a proven track record and going with the recommendations that make that track record what it is or rolling your own/something else and taking the risk with it. Most of what you are concerned about are not due to the OS but the nature of the hardware and what murphy's law throws into the works.

 

[Mirfster]

The article brought up a few concerns with the primary one being elimination of ZFS1 (RAID 5) and the future elimination of ZFS2 (RAID 6).

Is this the section that you were originally speaking about?

¨RAID5(and its ZFS equivalent RAIDZ1) is “dead” as of 2009. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
¨RAIDZ1 provide redundancy from any single disk failure. However, due to disk sizes increasing faster than hard drive reliability, RAIDZ1 is really not safe. This is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Eventually even RAIDZ2 will no longer be safe(estimated at around 2019).

If so, then from my understanding that is due to purely mathematical probability as well as drive capacity increasing.

 

[Al Slitter]

Yes this was the section, for commercial application this is not an issue but for a home situation it is in my mind over kill.
What I have and still am using is a single 2TB hard disk in my HTPC which only contains my movies. To protect the movies I have a full back up
on another hard drive which is situated in a hot swap bay on my desktop machine.
This drive is then removed after the full back up and or incremental back ups are done and kept in a safe place.

I want to go on record here by saying that I was unaware of the relationship between FreeNas and Nas4Free.
It is due to my ignorance and there was never any malice intended here to FreeNas and iXsystems.
Nas4Free is of course an alternative to those that want a more home orientated NAS device.

Thank you for the information.

 

[anodos]

Yes this was the section, for commercial application this is not an issue but for a home situation it is in my mind over kill.
What I have and still am using is a single 2TB hard disk in my HTPC which only contains my movies. To protect the movies I have a full back up
on another hard drive which is situated in a hot swap bay on my desktop machine.
This drive is then removed after the full back up and or incremental back ups are done and kept in a safe place.

I want to go on record here by saying that I was unaware of the relationship between FreeNas and Nas4Free.
It is due to my ignorance and there was never any malice intended here to FreeNas and iXsystems.
Nas4Free is of course an alternative to those that want a more home orientated NAS device.

Thank you for the information.

I'm a bit confused here. What qualifies as a 'home-oriented NAS device' and why does Nas4Free fall in this category? For all practical purposes they're the same. Both are based on freebsd. Both use zfs. System requirements in so far as freebsd & zfs will be the same. Raidz1 / raidz2 / raidz3 are identical on both. As is the need for ECC memory.

Also RAIDZ2/RAID6 is not going away any time soon. Note that the arguments against particular RAIDZ levels correspond to their equivalent hardware raid level. This is not a freenas specific problem.

You do seem very confused. I don't think there's as much distinction between the needs of a home user and a business user as you think there is. It seems like your primary concern is hardware cost, specifically as it relates to having to get large numbers of hard drives. This isn't something that will be solved by forking freenas. 2 drives (mirror) will always be the minimum bar for a reliable NAS system. Parity RAID and its caveats will also be the same for all operating systems. These aren't home use vs business use problems. These are computer problems.

About the only thing a fork at this time would achieve is maintaining the existing UI, which has the aesthetics of an AMC pacer.

 

[danb35]

I want to go on record here by saying that I was unaware of the relationship between FreeNas and Nas4Free.

It's not exactly a secret, but it can be somewhat confusing. iXSystems really brought a lot of the confusion on themselves when they bought the name of an existing, fairly-popular project, and the built a very different (similar overall function, very different implementation) project with that name. Then when development on old FreeNAS started back up under the name of NAS4Free, all bets were off on the public understanding what was going on.

I think it's important to note that the requirements that people often complain about aren't really that unique to FreeNAS, though people here are a little more, shall we say, enthusiastic about protecting their data. For example, although they aren't as up-front about it, if you do a bit of digging, you'll find that the requirements (or at least the recommendations) for using ZFS on NAS4Free are very similar to what's recommended for FreeNAS. Any filesystem is vulnerable to data corruption as a result of defective RAM, not just ZFS--though the risk is greater with ZFS (due to scrubs). The concern about RAID5/RAIDZ1 is entirely based on hardware error rates of hard drives. Though (IMO) it's exaggerated, nothing about ZFS or FreeNAS makes it worse than with any other OS or filesystem.

Can you build a FreeNAS box with 8 x 8 TB drives in RAIDZ1? Sure. Is that possibility going away? Not likely. Will we warn you if we see that you're doing that? You bet.