UnRaid / FreeNAS / Openfiler

[DanBoy67]

I'm currently looking at putting together my first NAS. After hours of forum-searching and decision making I've (sort-of) nailed down the hardware side of things, but am struggling to decide on a server OS....

UnRaid vs FreeNAS vs Openfiler....?

NAS is to serve as an HD media streamer so performance is key - read will be more important than write speed (although it would be nice to be able to copy thngs without having to wait days!).

Expandibility is also important - can a RAID 5 array be added to? (this is where UnRaid comes into its own)(oh and Ill be looking at a software solution as opposed to hardware RAID cards). I plan on starting with 3 x 1.5TB drives.

What are the pros/cons of the various protocols...SMD, NFS, HTTP...?

Any comments and views on these OS's would be much appreciated....thanks in advance

 

[00Roush]

I have never used UnRaid so I can't really comment on it. But I have used FreeNAS and Openfiler.

I tried Openfiler a while back and found it worked okay but not as easy to setup as FreeNAS. Also from what I remember it was difficult to force certain Samba settings to what I wanted in Openfiler. The problem with this was the default Samba buffer settings were too small and needed to be changed. This is also the case with FreeNAS and many other OSes that use Samba. FreeNAS allows the setting to be changed easily and has given me good performance on my hardware with the buffer sizes changed to 64k.

As for RAID I really am unsure of the performance. I recall doing some testing with a two drive RAID 0 array on FreeNAS and performance was no better than with a single drive. But I really have not spent much time testing with RAID setups so take that with a grain of salt. Overall I have found FreeNAS to be one of the easiest OSes to setup Samba shares with and performance with just single drives has been also very good with the above buffer change.

I do want to mention that I am only going off the experience I have had setting things up on my hardware. That goes for performance as well.

If you need I can provide some more detail and also some actual performance numbers.

Hope that helps a little.

00Roush

 

[Jay_S]

NAS is to serve as an HD media streamer ...

I vote for unRAID. I spent months trying various OSes (except for WHS) and file systems for my movie server. I chose unRAID in the end.

It's a "protected JBOD". There is a parity disk. No data or parity is striped. Each data disk has it's own self-contained reiserFS file system. All of this means that:

1. you can lose the parity drive. replace it and rebuild - no data lost.
2. you can lose a data drive. replace it and rebuild - no data lost.
3. you can lose parity + any number of data drives. Array is broken, you lose data on whichever data drives died. *BUT*, all the data on your non-dead drives is still GOOD. Since each drive is self-contained, you can plug it into any unix/linux box to access your data. This is HUGE.
4. you grow your "array" by just adding drives of any size (as long as they're not larger than your parity drive), any interface, any time. Doesn't matter. This is also HUGE. Means you can buy whatever drives offer must GB/$ when you need to.

Read performance is limited to the speed of whatever individual drive you're accessing (less SMB, etc protocol overhead, less file copy engine peculiarities, etc). With modern drives, single-disk continuous reads are approaching the limit of gigabit Ethernet. So this is nice.

BUT, unRAID's write speeds are terrible (there are 4 times as many file operations when writing because of how unRAID calculates parity). Expect writes to be about 25% as fast as reads.

But don't let that scare you - it's not that bad in practice. I'm approaching 2TB of HD video, and it's never been an issue except when initially loading all my media on it (that took a while). But now, it's no big deal. I rip straight to the unRAID server, and - even writing at about 20MB/s - it's still quicker than my optical drive can rip.

Other OSes I demoed were ubuntu (which love and am using for a small music server), FreeNAS 0.69 and 0.71, OpenSolaris & solaris derivatives (nexanta, etc).

 

[HappyBison]

Just to add a few notes:
If you need such flexibility from your RAID system, you may want to take a look at ZFS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs

It would be similar to unRAID in aspect that you can grow whenever you need it.
The advantage over unRAID is that write speeds are not affected that much and you get a good performance on writes.

AFAIK, currently OpenSolaris and FreeNAS 0.7 support it.

 

[eon]

biased input

I say give EON (http://eonstorage.blogspot.com) a look. Native ZFS storage. Can run from RAM booted from USB or CF. Requires getting your hands a little dirty but worth for the freedom and performance gained. Pretty soon it will have de-duplication!

No special controllers needed to recover if your hardware dies. Nor will you need to remember the ordering of the disks. All you'll need is access to a ZFS capable system that is running the equal or higher revision of zfs on your disks.

 

[MyPod]

FreeNAS is great. I use it at the moment as a media server for my music
collection. I tried the software raid5 which works nice and needs less CPU
power than I thought it would. It has nice monitoring tools like drive
temperature and other smart info and can send email notices if something is critical. The only problem I had was the rebuild time of the raid5 array after I
unplugged it by mistake. ( took a while to get it straight ) It has several nice
services like FTP , BitTorrent , iTunes/DAAP , Webserver....
AT the moment I play around with WHS & MediaCenter for video and backups.
The drive management of WHS is kinda funny and I'm not sure exactly how the
drive balancing works at the moment.

 

[eon]

List of EON features

Features:
- Simple and Secure CLI (command line interface) administration. Web-based GUI/BUI possible as a future development port of the Freenas web admin
- Supports ZFS, iSCSI (target and client initiator), NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS (Sun Microsystems Implementation) or Samba, SFTP, SSH, NTP, IP filtering, rsync
- Supports RAID levels:
RAID-0 (striping)
RAID-1 (mirroring)
RAID-Z (raidz or raidz1similar to RAID-5 with variable-width stripes to avoid RAID-5 write hole, requires 3 or more disks)
RAID-Z2 (raidz2 or RAID-6, double parity, requires 4 or more disks)
RAID-Z3 (raidz3 or triple parity RAID)
- Supports client OS, Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista, Mac OS X, Unix and Linux
- provides transparent and dynamic filesystem compression (using zlib or gzip) to save space
- Capable of expanding the zpool by expanding each disk in the pool (since snv_117)
- allows thin provisioning (green) file systems
- unlimited files, links, directories and snapshots(also known as version-ing)
- link aggregation
- IPfilter module and application to control/restrict access to the appliance/device
- DTrace, Perl and PHP
- De-duplication (coming soon: snv_129)

Supported add-on features:
- Firefly/iTunes media server (32-bit), formerly mt-daapd
- mediatomb (32-bit)
- napp-it web admin by Alka Guenther (since version 0.20)
- Transmission cli/web bit torrent client/server (available since binary kit 124 in download section).

As stated before if your hardware dies and your OS along with it. Once you have enough parity based on the zpool built, you will just pop the disks in new hardware with a new ZFS capable OS and your data will be available.

 

[MrRalph]

My take on this. I just recently build my own NAS. I wanted
- good read/write performance
- not to complicated
- RAID5 possible with monitoring and email and (that was a big thing for me)
- be able to run Squeezeboxserver
- living community, active support, proven technology
Therefor I installed Ubuntu server 9.10. Learning curve is doable, everythings seems to run smooth and simple. RAID5 also works perfectly hassle-free. Remember, whatever system you assemble, there is no (that means NO) substitute for a proper offline backup. (I backup to UBS drives with rsync).

I'm not totally convinced of RAID within the home, but up till now everything is ok.

Ralph