[TriLUG] FreeNAS vs DIY

[Francois Dion]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Bill Farrow <bill at arrowsreach.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Back in 2006, I lost personal data even with raid-1 and backups. Here's a
recap I did in 2007, and my solution, using raidZ, and 5 x 1TB (at the
time, later upgraded to 2TB drives):

On Tue, 2007-06-12:

"Warning, real case to follow, not a what if scenario:

Over the past 10 years, I've been slowly but surely ripping my vinyl
records to disk. This is quite a common operation on a PC or Mac, that you
have an ipod or any other music player, or simply to archive to CD (DVD
now). Imagine my disgust when silent corruption destroyed a good bit of
this. Not only that but since no actual error had occurred as far as the
file system or OS was concerned, the backup itself was copying garbage on
all the files that had been silently corrupted. Oh, the checksum matched
what was on disk, it just had been corrupted all along and getting worse.
Early on I would rip to wav, burn an audio CD and archive that. After a
while I had assumed I would be safe with a mirrored disk pair and a backup.
bzzt. wrong. So much for plug and play.

That was 2006.

Enter ZFS. All my computers now run Solaris on the desktop. ZFS everywhere.
Never again will I have to deal with this problem"


And of course, fast forward to 2013 and ZFS is on linux (even on the
raspberry pi and the like, as I had posted on my blog last year), *BSD,
OS/X, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, Solaris, Nexenta etc. 6 years later and
everything is still smooth. 1 disk went semi bad, detected by zpool scrub
before full failure. Swapped disk and happy trails.

There is napp-it, also: http://www.napp-it.org/napp-it/index_en.html

There is a free version of it. Runs on Solaris or OmniOS, but that means
it'll run also on OpenIndiana.



>
> > 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 ?)
>


Sir, which of our storage solution would you like, SAN, NAS or NSA?

Francois
--
www.pyptug.org  -  raspberry-python.blogspot.com  -  @f_dion