FreeNAS experiences? Is it something?
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Ive been running it for 6-8months having migrated from a Areca 24 * 1TB array running under Win7 Enterprise.
Running Xeon e5 processor, 32GB RAM and 10 4TB drives in RAIDZ2. Its been up running error free for about 4 months since my last upgrade to the latest 9.2.x version. I haven't made the leap to 9.3 until things settle down. I need stability, not cutting edge features sets. Performance over 10gbe networking is in the region of 450MB/s read & write. I had hoped for slightly more but TBH this is fine.
Generally been a decent experience, ZFS itself is cool for its data integrity and I sleep better at night for it.
FreeNAS is not something you can do 'cheaply' with bargain basic hardware, it likes lots of RAM and needs ECC RAM and a suitable CPU/motherboard obviously.
The guys at FreeNAS forums are rather tetchy with people who don't make an attempt to read the manuals or follow the basic how-to's. Assuming you don't try and cut corners, do things right they are generally a supportive bunch admittedly with a off sense of humour at times.
Its easy enough to spin up a VM to have a play about with the interface and create/destroy some arrays - get a feel for its nuances before you migrate critical data to it for sure. -
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FreeNAS lives at the pleasure of REFS and BTRFS. When those two mature, and they will, FreeNAS will go the way of the DoDo.
ZFS will live on if someone comes along and makes a great open source appliance focused on massive uptimes.
Thanks ;D
From quick-reading BTRFS it seems this is the same as ZFS, but then native for Linux (?)
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You can get ZFS on Linux, just not along with Linux due to licence issues:
http://zfsonlinux.org/
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue
ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). While both are free open source licenses they are restrictive licenses. The combination of them causes problems because it prevents using pieces of code exclusively available under one license with pieces of code exclusively available under the other in the same binary. In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code.
Comparing them is beyond me and I've decided to reset the OpenSuse defaults and stick to Ext4 rather than the recommended BTRFS / XFS and sit it out until 13.3.
Lots of good reading if you do a Google versus search.
https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs
