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Soo heres my question. Should I go with a FreeNAS system and run ZFS or should I just buy a hardware RAID card and stick with a plain ole windows server solution?
What are the benefits to FreeNAS?
My big concern is HD space. I want to start with 5 2TB drives but have the ability to expand the raid array later on should i decide to add 1 or 2 more 2TB drives.
With ZFS i can't realy do that. I can create one volume, but then I have to either replace the existing drives with LARGER drives or create a 2nd volume... means i may lose more space, etc.. and have multiple volumes, gets confusing.
With hardware raid5 i have the options of just adding more drives and increasing the array size on the fly, much easier.
Now if i go hardware raid, why use FreeNAS then? Why not stick with windows (like maybe windows home server, since i'll be doing this for a HTPC i can use its add-ons for movie ripping), or windows 7/windows server 2008...
What are the real pros/cons of each. Which would be faster?
Any advice is helpfull. Im not worried about "i can use freenas on cheap old hardware" my OLD hardware is actually a Q9550 processor and 8GB of DDR2 memory, so its not like a cheap-o extra box, its my old machine (just upgraded recently).
What are the benefits to FreeNAS?
My big concern is HD space. I want to start with 5 2TB drives but have the ability to expand the raid array later on should i decide to add 1 or 2 more 2TB drives.
With ZFS i can't realy do that. I can create one volume, but then I have to either replace the existing drives with LARGER drives or create a 2nd volume... means i may lose more space, etc.. and have multiple volumes, gets confusing.
With hardware raid5 i have the options of just adding more drives and increasing the array size on the fly, much easier.
Now if i go hardware raid, why use FreeNAS then? Why not stick with windows (like maybe windows home server, since i'll be doing this for a HTPC i can use its add-ons for movie ripping), or windows 7/windows server 2008...
What are the real pros/cons of each. Which would be faster?
Any advice is helpfull. Im not worried about "i can use freenas on cheap old hardware" my OLD hardware is actually a Q9550 processor and 8GB of DDR2 memory, so its not like a cheap-o extra box, its my old machine (just upgraded recently).