techbustr

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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