FreeNAS vs NAS4Free

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Meeho

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What are your thoughts/experiences regarding FreeNAS vs NAS4Free? I've read that N4F can get by with lower hardware/less RAM, but does it trade anything in performance or features for those lower requirements?

Also, I would probably start with 2 drives in RAID1. When I add two more drives later, is there a benefit in adding them as RAID10 with existing ones vs just adding another separate RAID1 array? The NAS will be used for backup and media storage.
 
While I'm not using any of 'em (just plain FreeBSD) I'd say that nas4free seems a bit more reliable as it uses a newer codebase or at least used to compared to FreeNAS.
//Danne
 
I have not used either personally in a long time, but I have a friend that is using FreeNAS and loving it.

I think now that FreeNAS was acquired by iXsystems it has become a much more developed software. In the last few releases they have started to add a lot of new features. SMB3 was added in the last release which can help with Windows clients.
 
We use FreeNAS here at our office as a company file server as we quickly outgrew our Windows solution not long after I started a year ago. We also use NAS4Free as an iSCSI target for our Unitrends backup storage we are currently testing (as FreeNAS currently does not work with UEFI based systems). The polish on FreeNAS is nice and we don't even use 1/3 the features that are provided. System seems to be doing pretty well so far, lots of RAM is your best friend setting one of these up (we started with 128GB).
 
I don't think I'll need more than 8-16 GB for the intended use, also no deduplication.
 
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If you use ZFS it like RAM not just for deduplication but as read cache. It depends on your use case, for backup and media you shouldn't need more than that for most applications.
 
I had a number of issues on the last version of N4F with pools, I would add the drives to create a vdev and then try to add that vdev to a pool and the system would hang. I tried many different things to get it working but ended up switching over to FreeNAS and haven't looked back. The newest version of N4F (which I've tested half-heartedly as a VM) and FreeNAS are both fantastic, easily crushing the features and performance of my previous file server running WHSv1... with the exception of Drive Extender. Almost absolute seamless mix-n-matching of different disks that could create an ever expanding pool was great. Not the most secure or reliable though so I decided to befriend ZFS and I'll never store my data on anything else :D
 
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