Freenas, anyone use it

[heisthegaffer]

Hi all

I have a frankly atrocious WD NAS which I've had enough of. How thay can sell something so cack I'll Never know. Why can't they get these thinks to work.

Anyway, anyone use or used freenas at all?

[heisthegaffer]

Sorry, Freenas!

[anonymous-user]

I had a WD nas thing a few years back, was a terrible product and got sent back.

No experience with Freenas but a synology nas will be less hassle and will work.

[mikef]

The only kit I’d consider installing FreeNAS on is an HPE Proliant Gen 10 - and a Synology will both be cheaper and a much better NAS for non-enterprise use

If you have an old PC and are thinking of installing FreeNAS on it, my advice would be to flog it and buy a real NAS...

[heisthegaffer]

Thanks all. Not that great a idea then!

[markiii]

try unraid

[anonymous-user]

heisthegaffer said:

Thanks all. Not that great a idea then!

Depends how much tinkering, etc you want to do or do you want something that is easy to setup, works and has good support. Mine is still getting updates, etc and is 8 years old.

[Bikerjon]

The last time I tried Freenas it was on V10 and although it looked promising and had a load of interesting features, that particular release was shelved shortly after and I don't believe there were any upgrade options IIRC. This served as a useful reminder why free software isn't always such a good idea!

Synology or the higher spec WD MyCloud devices are fine for home use. If you want to re-use old hardware then I'd look at Unraid.

[8bit]

I built my own NAS a couple of years ago, got an InWin chassis, Mini ITX motherboard and repurposed a CPU and RAM from my previous main desktop PC incarnation. I run OpenMediaVault on it, it's an offshoot of FreeNAS but it's based on Debian Linux instead of BSD. I really like it, I had a Synology device before that but I didn't get on with it. Definitely worth checking OpenMediaVault out.

[heisthegaffer]

Thanks all, will have a think

[essayer]

Been running it for years on a HP Microserver, no complaints. Easy to run and keep up to date.