Freenas? Confused, making progress

[tucansam]

Week three of late nights researching my options and I'm still on the fence, but making progress.

Have an older system sitting here with some SATA disks hooked up. Tried unRAID (didn't like it) and FlexRAID (too beta). Tried FreeNAS 8 (hated it). FreeNAS 7 is re-syncing an array now, but I'm confused on things. UFS or ZFS? If I go ZFS, do I have to use RAIDZ or is it automatic?

What I want is a dynamically expandable array. I want to use disks of different size, add when I want, and be able to suffer a single drive failure. I'd also like to test all of this on this system before I invest in bigger disks.

I am still shopping for youtube videos and online docs relating to ZFS configurating and how to set up a RAID5-like array using it. Also looking for information on how to add drives (can I add them to a live system by just plugging them in (ala hot swap) or do I need to power the system down first?). Also looking for how to upgrade and existing drive (or several)

Looks like FreeNAS *may* be what I'm looking for... I didn't like how unRAID presented each disk separately -- I want one giant share to be visible to my Windows machines.

Also looking at NexentaStor but according to their site it looks like there is a free trial that then needs to be purchased?

Finally would like to do mirrored USB thumb drives for the OS, whichever way I go..... tutorial on that?

THanks.

 

[GregN]

Tried FreeNAS 8 (hated it). FreeNAS 7 is re-syncing an array now, but I'm confused on things. UFS or ZFS? If I go ZFS, do I have to use RAIDZ or is it automatic?

What did you hate about V8?

What I want is a dynamically expandable array. I want to use disks of different size, add when I want, and be able to suffer a single drive failure. I'd also like to test all of this on this system before I invest in bigger disks.

RAID-Z is not expandable, the ZFS filesystem is. Raid-Z does have the advantage of being able to use non-homogeneous drives.

ZFS can span disks, and you can share that with windows machine as one volume.

Depending on your SATA controller, you can dynamically add another disk to a running system.

Also looking at NexentaStor but according to their site it looks like there is a free trial that then needs to be purchased?

As long as your overall size (RAW) is less than 18TB you can continue to use NexentaStor for free.