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

 

[LaCie]

I've tried FreeNAS and I think its a little complicated for the average user. Setting up a raid 5 with it is a little complicated too. It has a lot of options for connection protocols however. CIFS,NFS?,ect..

I have not tried Openfiler becuase it seemed even more complicated. I don't know what its strength is.

unRAID seems pretty easy to setup and is the only real solution if you must have expandability. Raid 5 requires that to add new HDD and re-initialize raid. I only worry that it won't support all the connection types you might want. But I believe it has uPnP so you should be fine for streaming.

 

[msl]

Linux MD software RAID certainly allows new drives/partitions to be added to a RAID 5 array in a full-blown Linux distribution. Gory details are available here (for techies only):

http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/Growing

Whether or not any of the distributions you mention provide administrative options to do this, I don't know. Sorry.

 

[DonB]

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.

This is not possible in Freenas - RAID5 arrays are static once created. Not sure about the other distros you mentioned.

The most flexibility will always require a full Linux distro but results in a less user friendly experience.

I've been running Freenas for years and it works very well. however I'm in the process of re-building my NAS using CentOS 5 because I need more flexibility and now require features not easily added to Freenas. Let me tell you, if you think Freenas is complex rolling your NAS from scratch is exponentially more complex!

 

[eon]

Other options

You should also take a look at
EON ZFS NAS: http://eonstorage.blogspot.com

It's a little involved but you get access to ZFS, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and raidz which is expandable and much more.

also take a look at http://amahi.org