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Freenas or Linux + Snapraid for home media server?

Tengis

Tengis

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I'm hoping to get everything set up this week. I don't have much of any experience with either but Ive been told multiple times that I should go with Snapraid. I've got four 3tb Toshiba drives.

I really like that Freenas runs from a thumb drive. I would love if it supported Snapraid (does it somehow?). If I go with Linux + snapraid then I'm going to have to buy a small drive for the OS.
 
Hmm. Valid point. Does it prevent writing to the thumb drive constantly to keep it from failing?
 
Hmm... thinking about doing dual raid1 with Freenas. Sigh... getting so many suggestions from friends.
 
Depends on what you are storing. Just general stuff = FreeNAS. Specifically storing [lots of] media files, movies and whatnot, = SnapRAID.

SnapRAID is inferior to any normal RAID solution, and even more so to ZFS, except for a few specific features:

You can mix different size drives easily.
You can add single drives to the array.
HDDs can spin down and only the drive you read from needs to spin up.
Worst case if too many HDDs fail the data on the remaining drives continues to work.

IMO these features start to be really useful when you have lots of drives. 4 drives or whatever its not that big a deal. I'd just go FreeNAS, 4 drive raidz... if you ever need more space you'd be looking at adding 2 drives in a mirror to your pool or another 4 drive raidz to the pool. Or somehow backing up all your data, getting 1 more drive and creating a new 5 drive raidz and then copying all data back.

Anyways. If you are only storing media, and plan to regularly be adding more drives, then maybe SnapRAID would make sense.
 
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Im primarily storing media. The potential benefits of having less wear on the drives sounds good in theory. I also like the idea of not losing everything if more then one drive fails. I don't plan on adding drives soonish but its nice knowing it's an option.
 
If you are only storing media, I would suggest Snapraid/flexraid/unraid/etc. ZFS is for high reliable stuff with automatic data corruption protection. And that is not necessary for media files. If you are really concerned about data corruption, you can run snapraid ontop ZFS disks and get the best of two worlds.
 
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