After my HP laptop bit the dust and I purchased my MacBook I've become interested in a NAS solution. I've been testing out two candidates -- Windows Home Server and FreeNAS. I'll review my FreeNAS experiences first. I have 2 PC's for testing and enough hard drives to test both side by side for mac compatibility, Xbox 360 streaming capability, and general ease of use.
FreeNAS was the first NAS solution I've attempted to use. Booting up was a cinch and I was off and running with the live CD. I plugged up the trusty old HP and popped in the CD. Deciphering the text through the video artifacts wasn't too difficult and I managed to get the system installed onto a 64MB CF card. After a quick reboot and a few clicks to assign a static IP I was up and ready to get managing the system.
The web GUI that comes with FreeNAS is quite spartan but works extremely well once you have experience with it. I was able to follow along with the online installation guide to get my 100G internal HDD mounted and formatted UFS (the required format for the system). Once complete, I turned on AFP for my Mac upstairs and I copied down my iTunes library. The 35G or so of data copied down relatively quickly, and from my laptop I was able to update my configuration in iTunes to point to the new library location and viola!
This level of success so quickly spurred me to going a bit larger with this experiment. I have the following hard drives available for testing: 1 500G external, 1 internal 500G, 1 80G internal, and 1 13G internal. I also have 2 PC's that I can use for testing. The server I choose to use for FreeNAS is an AMD 1800+ XP with 512MB RAM. I install the 13G drive along with the internal 500G drive and pop in the live CD. Installing to the smaller HDD is easy once again. I format the 500G drive and load it up with all of my data.
I have an Xbox 360 ready and waiting for some streaming content, so I turn on the UPnP service. Fuppes (the name of the UPnP service) is configured by pointing it to your media files using the web GUI. Once turned on you must complete a database rebuild and a virtual container rebuild, and if you have a large number of files this can be an extensive process. Amazingly enough once this was complete I was able to stream my DivX files to the 360 with no issues whatsoever.
FreeNAS also has built in iTunes/DAAP streaming, but I found it to be too buggy to use. It seemed to work ok from a client perspective, but cpu usage would max out on the poor server until I gave it the old kill -9 command. I'll be researching this further.
A bittorrent client is also built in (Transmission). This comes with it's own web GUI and it seems to work flawlessly. I'm highly impressed with this portion of the server. If only they could allow blocklists to be more easily enabled. FTP services are built in and work as expected.
All in all, I'm highly impressed...ESPECIALLY for a 100% free piece of software. Some services I have not had a chance to try out so far are iSCSI, RSYNC, and the web server.
My final plan is to select between this and Windows Home Server, then use my two 500G drives in a mirrored fashion. Right now, FreeNAS has a formidable lead.
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5 comments
Indeed FreeNAS is a good choice when it comes to NAS-only. When I was looking for a NAS for my home network, FreeNAS was also one of the options and was exactly the last one to stand along with Windows Home Server (pre- power pack 1 that time).
There are few reasons I have selected WHS over FreeNAS at the end though:
1. I personally wanted more from my server - to be able to install some kind of virtual machines.
2. Be able to install file indexing software (ended up with MyMovies)
3. Not sure about FreeNAS (didn't go that far), but WHS's duplication has saved my data 2 times already. Again not sure if FreeNAS has support for that - didn't checked.
Other than that - FreeNAS is one of the home NAS solutions IMHO.
I second StPatrick on the duplication feature : WHS duplication over several pieces of hardware is configured on a directory by directory basis.
I don't care losing MP3 and a few movies.
I don't care losing the backup of my PCs => it's only a copy of existing data.
I *DO* care losing photos that are stored only on the WHS server.
"basic" RAID mirroring (whatever the level) is a bit too expensive to secure all your data.
That's one of the point which makes my heart goes to WHS for the moment
Thank you so much for your comments!
I've continued testing FreeNAS since I made this post. I have successfully configured Time Machine on 2 mac laptops to use the server for backups, and this has worked so far.
For performing backups on the machine itself, I've configured rsync to run 3 times per day to copy one of the 500G drives to the other. This seems to be everything I need for keeping a backup of my data on this drive.
A few of the biggest negatives I've encountered so far are around the UPnP service. Sometimes it stops working and I have to restart the service using the web GUI, which is annoying. Also, my music library is not overly large compared to some (30G) but fuppes took several hours to index this content. When it was indexed and I tried to access it on the 360, it would take several minutes to pull up the list of albums. Eventually I removed the music from my index, and indexing videos is very quick. Also, the index must be rebuilt any time new media is added.
I'll be very interested in a couple of things with WHS. I'll definitely be checking out the media sharing capability. I'm also looking forward to checking out the way WHS handles drives that are added and storing media across them. I'll also be looking to see how it performs copying files around and how processor intensive everything is.
Eventually on one of these servers I'd like to configure "something" to automatically execute once a DVD is inserted and rip it to a DivX file in my library. I think this would be *sweet* for a server hidden off in the corner of the closet.
Hopefully I'll be installing WHS this weekend to do some testing and I'll have some initial comments about it once complete. I expect the installation will be more involved than the FreeNAS process was.
I started with FreeNAS a couple years ago on old hardware that was lying around. I found it to be rock solid (even when the software was in 0.6xx beta stage). I used Clonzilla Live to do image backups of my pcs to my FreeNAS server. Not quite as slick or automated as WHS, but it did the job.
Since then, I have graduated to the HP MS 485 and I haven't looked back. The remote functionality and automated backups are the killer features. The hundreds of add-ins are just gravy.
Hi,
Wonder if you can help? Loaded FreeNAS and configured to DAAP/iTunes. I can see freenas in the iTunes 'Shared' locatin and can see the files, I can play the files...but that is all. I cannot copy or move to playlists...any ideas???
Cheers
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