- Joined
- May 28, 2011
- Messages
- 10,996
Bob,
There are other solutions out there as you are aware of and I'm not one to steer someone in a certain direction but my personal experience with FreeNAS has been very good and solid. I have been with this project since it splintered from the original FreeNAS code (now NAS4Free) and there were a lot of challenges but the software has become pretty solid. There are some extra things like all these plugins of which I'm not a huge fan of specifically but if you want a basic NAS solution that has fast throughput and is stable, FreeNAS is one of those products. You are not tethered to specific hardware so recovery from a hardware failure is generally not going to be a difficult thing to do over the other products which may be around. As for costs of a NAS, spending $300 to $400 on the NAS hardware (minus drives) is cheap for what FreeNAS offers (try to get full Gbit speed out of a comercial NAS for that price), and you could scale this by starting with 8GB ECC RAM and adding more later (just purchase the right MB and CPU up front) and use an old computer case initially, buy a new one if you want when you find one on sale. And you could just start with an older computer system with at least 6GB RAM and add some drives, give FreeNAS a real trial run and if you like it, upgrade your hardware and just move your drives to it and boot flash drive.
Nothing is perfect for everyone so you would need to select which NAS system is going to best meet your needs.
I think you should have enough information from this thread to make a decision.
Good luck and hope you are happy with whatever choice you make.
There are other solutions out there as you are aware of and I'm not one to steer someone in a certain direction but my personal experience with FreeNAS has been very good and solid. I have been with this project since it splintered from the original FreeNAS code (now NAS4Free) and there were a lot of challenges but the software has become pretty solid. There are some extra things like all these plugins of which I'm not a huge fan of specifically but if you want a basic NAS solution that has fast throughput and is stable, FreeNAS is one of those products. You are not tethered to specific hardware so recovery from a hardware failure is generally not going to be a difficult thing to do over the other products which may be around. As for costs of a NAS, spending $300 to $400 on the NAS hardware (minus drives) is cheap for what FreeNAS offers (try to get full Gbit speed out of a comercial NAS for that price), and you could scale this by starting with 8GB ECC RAM and adding more later (just purchase the right MB and CPU up front) and use an old computer case initially, buy a new one if you want when you find one on sale. And you could just start with an older computer system with at least 6GB RAM and add some drives, give FreeNAS a real trial run and if you like it, upgrade your hardware and just move your drives to it and boot flash drive.
Nothing is perfect for everyone so you would need to select which NAS system is going to best meet your needs.
I think you should have enough information from this thread to make a decision.
Good luck and hope you are happy with whatever choice you make.
