[TriLUG] FreeNAS vs DIY

[Bill Farrow]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Igor Partola <igor at igorpartola.com> wrote:
> - A file storage server. It will get two 2TB drives for a RAID array to store
> important files like family photos and documents.

Personally, I would not bother with RAID-1 if that what you were
thinking.  If you are after redundancy and data integrity for your
family photos and documents, then I would use multiple copies with
periodic checksum verification.  I have been meaning to try ZFS for
this at home for all of my stuff too.

> My first question is whether FreeNAS can handle all these daemons without
> having to resort to compiling code specifically for it and hacking around
> where it will let you install things?

No idea, but FreeNAS has ZFS and a great feature set. (Why did I
initially type that as FreeNSA - Freudian slip ?)

> My second question is: if FreeNAS is not the way to go (I will likely set up
> an Ubuntu machine then), what filesystem/RAID setup should I use to
> provide strong guarantees about data integrity? I want to ensure that there
> is as little bitrot as possible, that backups are easy, and that it is fairly fast.

There are out of tree ZFS modules for Linux.  Otherwise btrfs is ready yet ?

Bill