What's the best alternative to FreeNAS?

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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Right now I'm fighting to get my pool back after replacing the boot drive. I've run into a multitude of strangeness that is compelling me to consider other NAS OS's. A friendly support forum would be a plus.

TIA :)
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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I really like proxmox, but I wouldn't call their forum friendly. There are enough people around here that could probably help you out though. There's gea's napp-it as well, he's a class act helping people out. If you want just a filer, napp-it. If you want virtualization as well, proxmox or esxi+napp-it.

If you want a nice UI for file sharing etc., I would say napp-it is nicer.
 
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K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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After having issues with Freenas and 10gb, I am moving my stand alone box to napp-it. I've been already using it for 2 AIOs and am very happy with it.
 
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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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+1 for just using Proxmox or Napp-it.

Proxmox is nice because you are using ZoL and there are a lot of resources out there for Debian Linux.
 
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Fritz

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Well, after much cursing, I managed to get my pool back. Next question is can a FreeNAS pool be transferred to Napp-It?
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Export pool in Freenas and import into napp-it. I can confirm if works for freenas and napp-it. I haven't used proxmox.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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It's the same commands on both.

zpool export <name>
zpool import <name>


If you don't export the pool, it will give you a message that the pool was last used on a different machine. It's a safety thing.

zpool import -f <name>

Will make it do it anyway.


Works in proxmox the same as bsd and Solarish (napp-it)
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Have you considered maybe stepping away from DIY and going QNAP or Synology?
 
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ttabbal

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Have you considered maybe stepping away from DIY and going QNAP or Synology?
Blasphemy! :)


I trust ZFS more than any proprietary solution. It's your data, so only you can decide for yourself though. There are certainly convinces with them though.
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Blasphemy! :)


I trust ZFS more than any proprietary solution. It's your data, so only you can decide for yourself though. There are certainly convinces with them though.
But this thread is for Fritz not you ;)

Some can't / don't want to manage storage via CLI which is what is required for Proxmox.

Both Napp-IT and Proxmox are def. not as easy as FreeNAS is overall, and neither have near the following/support as FreeNAS does either.
GEA is great don't get me wrong but he's one guy not an entire community with thousands upon thousands of threads with questions/answers.

IMHO, no matter which OS you run ZFS on you must read the manual, and know how to do google searches and be ready to spend time learning about it and searching. It's not simple by any means unless you're using the bare minimum and using the easy to navigate FreeNAS GUI.
 

ttabbal

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All good points. I like to joke about the cult of ZFS, but I see why some people prefer the more turnkey solutions.

An in-between option might be UnRAID. They seem to also support Docker these days...
 

dtrv

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Nov 23, 2016
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I use SmartOS as NAS and VM Host. I like because it isn't overloaded with features I don't need.

ZFS, Solaris Zones, LX Zones and Docker running on bare metall as-bare-as-metal-can-be [emoji1] Plus KVM, great networking, tools like dtrace and resource management.
Only a few commands to manage all of it: imgadm, vmadm, zfs, zpool ... did I miss one?

Drawback: bad hardware support. Needs enterprise class hardware. prefered Intel NICs, ECC RAM, no cheap SAS/SATA controllers ...
 
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fractal

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Jun 7, 2016
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I moved from FreeNAS to NAS4Free and never looked back.

If you want features and jails and plugins and ... and ... and ... look elsewhere.

if you want a bucket to hold your bits, then NAS4Free does the job for me.
 
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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Not sure if you guys saw this, but yesterday Issac Huang at Intel presented DRAID for ZFS. Check out the presentation when it is posted. OCE for RAIDZ would be a game changer.

OpenZFS
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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