7
5
I was contemplating purchasing a QNAP 459-II for my home storage/streaming needs and a friend advised me that I should look into ZFS rather. I read up a bit on the filing system technology and was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information I found. It honestly was too much for me to take in to base a decision on, which is why I ask here - relying on your feedback and experiences. Here is my desired usage scenario:
- 2TB to 4TB over the next 2 years
- File types: music, video, photos, Office Documents, PDFs, and general files downloaded from the internet
- Would like to stream media files across all devices in home (have an 802.11n router with mostly 802.11n compliant devices)
- Use as a backup point for files from 2 laptops
- Would like to work with documents (eg. MS Word files) off the network - don't know if that's advisable
From what I've read ZFS requires a lot of juice (max Ram + server CPU preferably) to work optimally and requires some hectic shell-type configurations. I'm not deeply technical (but always willing to learn something new), so something like a QNAP for me where I just have to plug in my drives and probably go thru some initial setup wizard is the easiest.
Is sound technical knowledge required to get a ZFS system working right and more importantly, maintain? What are the pro's and cons of either a ZFS or QNAP-like setup?
I would sincerely appreciate any advice you may offer as I feel I'm truly out of my depth here! Thank you
Hey sblair, thank u ever so much for the feedback! I will take at a look at the articles u have linked to. Tell me though, does FreeNas8 make it relatively simple to setup and maintain a ZFS-based NAS? I'm not very clued up with the networking/hardware side of things, so naturally I started getting a bit overwhelmed by reading articles mentioning setting up zpools and vdevs and zil logs. – maGz – 2012-07-19T23:47:30.493
Just reading up on your article now and it looks very interesting, but what drives did you settle on? Are there particular drives to avoid, like the 5400RPM green drives? – maGz – 2012-07-19T23:53:49.053
Yes, there's a lot of confusing terminology. But, for a home NAS, most of it can be ignored. A
vdev
is just a collection of hard drives. Azpool
is an aggregation ofvdev
s. My NAS just has onevdev
, containing four hard drives, and onezpool
. In the article, I deliberately avoided recommending the make and model of hard drives. YMMV. But I did use "green" drives, for lower power consumption. – sblair – 2012-07-20T00:00:00.340Thank you for the comprehensive answer. Reading your article seems to simplify things for me quite a bit. Do you think Nas4free will work on a ESXI 4 setup? – maGz – 2012-07-20T00:06:28.747
I forgot to ask as well...would SATA3 disks make a huge difference to read/write speeds over the network? is ~80Mbps okay for FullHD video to stream to a TV? --- sorry for the additional questions, but its the last one, promise! – maGz – 2012-07-20T00:09:03.377
I don't really know anything about ESXi, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. When I was trying to figure out what OS to install on my NAS, I played around with FreeNAS 0.7 and 8 in VirtualBox, until I was comfortable using them. The network connection will be the bottleneck for transferring data, not SATA revision 2 vs. revision 3. 80 Mbps should be ok, but it depends on the maximum bit-rate of the 1080p video, and other network activity, etc. – sblair – 2012-07-20T00:48:43.363
I hear u...good advice. Thank u once again sblair! – maGz – 2012-07-20T00:52:08.067
1
FreeNAS 8.3.0 (released 2012-10-26) is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS filesystem.
– Graham Perrin – 2013-01-07T14:59:57.620