It's high time I update our family's storage/back-up plans.

We currently have an OS X laptop that serves as my wife's primary work machine, an older iMac that's used mainly for printing (via a USB connection), and a couple of linux desktops. Our primary use for all of the machines is work for her theatre company -- photography, some video editing, design work (playbills, brochures, etc), and the like. Stuff is largely stored locally on each individual machine, which is awful. My wife emails herself things on the laptop, so she can go upstairs and print them out, because she doesn't want to install crappy, bloated printer drivers on her laptop. The iMac was our primary machine for several years, so it, at least, has a couple of external USB drives used for time machine backups. Nothing else (including her work laptop) has ever been backed up.

This all needs to change.

I want some centralized storage, so that we have easier shared access to documents and media. I want all of our machines backed up regularly (preferably to centralized storage, then central storage to the cloud, I think). I want the printer connected to the NAS, so that we can print from anywhere. And I need a network that can support this -- right now, my wife works primarily over wifi, everything else is wired via the 4-port FIOS router we got from our ISP. It would be spiffy if we could join the modern life, and have some centralized media streaming, but that's less important.

We've been round about this topic of conversation before, but the last time I recall seeing it was a few years ago, so since technology changes so quickly, I figured I'd start out fresh. I can deal with configuration, etc, but I really know jack about the various turnkey NAS hardware options available, and even less about cloud storage offerings (last I looked, many of them frowned on backing up network drives). I don't mind something like freeNAS, but I don't want to shop for components and build my own hardware beyond opening a box up to add more drives to expand capacity.

What do you all use, recommend, and anti-recommend?

I'm super duper happy with my Synology DS214Play. There may be better models out there by now, but this is doing well for me.

Yesterday one of the disks in its array went down and it calmly sent me an email telling me about it, and beeped gently in the closet (with an option to turn off the beep).

The Synology Hybrid Raid system is going to make replacing this disk super easy. I'm taking advantage of this failure to bring it up from 4tb to 6tb. I'll swap in a 6tb for the failed 4tb drive, let it rebuild and run for a while, then swap in another 6tb into the other 4tb slot, and then the whole thing will be up to 6tb with no downtime.

It does a good job of streaming video and audio. I can stream with either its Synology streaming servers or with Plex. It's a good host for Plex.

I gave up on the hardware nas approach, it's just one more thing I had to care for.

After trying a few of the online services, I settled on cubby.com. It works flawlessly and has the best OS integration.

3rd party attempts at Time Machine compatibility have not gone well in my experience. Most NASes implement it by taking what Netatalk/NetAFP releases, and it will likely corrupt the backup after a few months. I have my Macs set up to backup to a ReadyNAS, and an Airport Extreme with a USB disk attached. The NAS backup is rebuilt from scratch every few months, the Airport one ran fine long enough for my machines to start expiring old backups.

Offsite, I use Backblaze. It's on my desktop (Mac Pro) and laptop. I cloned all my old data off the NAS onto a 4TB drive sitting in the Mac Pro, so it's all backed up that way. This is only a transitional strategy, while I can leverage OS X Spotlight and other tools to whittle down the crap I'm still keeping around. I trust Backblaze to work fine on OS X, as their company has a number of ex Apple engineers on staff.

The two NASes I have at this point are turning into a way to get rid of my DVD shelves. Plex is part of this mix, and I've started just exporting my DVDs as a flat .MP4 files. I don't run the Plex server on the NAS directly, as it's transcoding power is underwhelming. Going to rethink this soon though, as the new Apple TV is coming and will be the point where the Mac Mini leaves my TV.

Ideally if I were to redo anything today, I'd seek out a solution that runs a file system that can detect and possibly stop bitrot, and allows spotlight searches to work. I've been tempted to just turn the existing NAS into a iSCSI box, and let my Mini run as a ZFS server. But I've not gotten around to this, and hope that Mac filesystems improve before I do revisit this likely in 2018. Been watching Marco Arment's progress in this arena. One handy thing for him, Backblaze backs up his entire NAS due to his use of iSCSI.

Yes, I can understand this. I'm hoping that with the right option, it's a set-it-and-forget-it operation until it's time to replace/upgrade a drive. I don't mind a bit of up-front installation/configuration time.


That looks pretty similar to crashplan, right? The downside is that I don't see linux support (in cubby), beyond WebDAV. I also dislike the notion of having to go to the cloud, simply to get files from one room to the other. We have fiber, but it's the slowest/cheapest plan.

My primary interest in the cloud is for backup, rather than sharing. Aside from direct family, I'm not much of a data-sharing person.

That's not good news. Is this recent experience, or a few years ago? Do you remember the Netatalk/NetAFP versions you'd have been on, then? A bit of googling suggests this was a problem around 2012, but I don't see anything more recent indicating that it's still an issue (or that it's fixed). The bug fix list for recent releases is pretty enormous.

Maybe instead of Time Machine, the better solution is to use the crashplan client, and back up to the NAS (or directly to the cloud). But I thought I read that crashplan requires a working internet even for backups across the LAN.


*sigh* Still no linux client.


This is my current attraction to a FreeNAS box. ZFS is a wonderful thing. But I don't have any experience running FreeNAS in the long term.

That's a dual-drive model, correct? So you're essentially on RAID-1?



That sounds nice. Are the drives hot-swappable?


I'll look into this Plex thing... I saw FreeNAS had a plugin for it, too. Jeez, I feel old, with all this technology. I'm gonna be one of those people who fixes their blinking VCR clock by putting electrical tape over it.

Plex is a great service for playing files stored on your network to a variety of devices. They have apps for pretty much everything at this point, including Roku and the new Apple TV. However, the only Synology device that appears capable of transcoding 1080p files seems to be the DS415+, which has an Atom CPU. Even then, it seems to struggle and max out the processing power. But if the file doesn't need to be transcoded on the fly I don't think it's as much of an issue. Tony had a thread about this a while back.

I personally like Crashplan a lot. I've used it for about 6 years now, and in that time I've only done about 3 or 4 file restores, but one of those happened to be every photo and video I'd taken for the previous ten years, so as far as I'm concerned it's worth every penny. It's essential insurance.

I'm not sure if an internet connection is required for backup over the LAN. It's certainly not necessary for backing up to local disks.

IMO, a NAS isn't that essential for backups. I'm fine with just a cloud backup. The problem I have is that I store all my data on my NAS and almost nothing on my actual computer. The problem with that is that Crashplan isn't officially supported by Synology, and the unofficial package I have installed on my system is a real resource hog when it's at its worst. It even crashed my diskstation the other day and I had to manually shut down because I couldn't even log into the GUI.

Correct.



Yes. The 214play is one of the models that supports hot-swap.

Though the Synology RAID system is just a bit of icing atop some existing linux RAID system, I was impressed by their description of how their version of the technology works. I'm looking forward to seeing it work in action. In theory I don't have to do anything other than just swap the physical drives and wait for each rebuild in turn.



Good point. If you're in a position where you want the NAS backed up to the cloud, then I agree, you need to make sure your NAS has the ability to support whatever backup service that you use.

I personally use the NAS as a media server, and as a secondary backup for things that our household already keeps on their local systems and/or backs up through other means. For instance, my audio production work files go on the NAS, but they are also backed up in two other places (not counting the audio workstation itself). So I don't feel a huge need to back up the NAS.

I do suppose it would be a PITA to have to re-build the NAS and all its contents if it were to go fully down. For instance, I'm currently in the window where one of the RAID pair has failed and I'm waiting for the replacement to arrive Wednesday. If the second drive fails before then, then I'd have to rebuild and repopulate the NAS from scratch. I wouldn't lose any data, just the rebuild and reconfiguration time. In a situation like that, I could see the need to have the NAS backed up. It's something I'm going to consider more carefully in the future.

I run unRAID here but it's certainly not what I'd call user friendly for a non techy person and requires a bit of support, but I like tinkering. v6 has helped a lot though. It has a single redundant drive but each drive runs its own filesystem so if even two drives go down, the rest will still run independently.

I was looking at XPenology which is a Synology hack for not Synology hardware. It has some issues too though. Synology hardware looks pretty good and supports a lot of add ons and functions.

Note that Crashplan is purely a backup service. I also use it to backup my unRAID NAS and provide a local destination for machines.

Cubby.com is more like fileserver in the cloud that has some backup like functionality - looks like Dropbox. I'd still want to keep a full local copy though in case something happens to their service. You're kind of at their mercy if they're hacked or go bust.

I thought this way as well, but my engineer moved to Austria so I needed it. It uploads files to the cloud as they are modified and then automatically downloaded to my engineer's 'puter. I don't even notice it happening. Now I've got employees in Brazil & China as well...

What I really like about it (besides that it just works), is that any dir can be "made a cubby". Most of the others I tried needed the sync'd dir to be on the desktop.

Send them an email about the lack of linux support... I'll do it as well.

Looks like my NAS is running 2.2.5, the newest 2.2 branch release. Laptop rebuilt it's backup on that one on October 13th. Not sure if the 3.0 or 3.1 releases improve it, I got frustrated enough to walk away from the problem for a while, hence the USB drive on the Airport now.

Perhaps this has improved, as the 2.2 era is also when the project was nearly cancelled due to lack of funding. Netgear by way of the ReadyNAS was one of the only storage vendors funding it at the time. This has improved a little since then, though I still don't know if Synology helps at all. They were off on their own forked version when the issue came up back then.

Overall I'd still recommend Time Machine somewhere in the mix for the wife's laptop at least. It has saved me a few times from accidental deletes or saves quicker then recovery by something like Crashplan.

Was digging around the ReadyNAS community for the current state there. Seems it's still an issue even on the newer units running newer Netatalk releases. One person caught the new bit rot detection feature discovering an issue in the time machine files on the NAS. (ReadyNAS units running OS 6 use BTRFS). He's also being told some rather bad things by support, trying to cut him off at 3 months into a 3 year warranty.

That answers my own question on if it would be worth going through the pain to manually upgrade my units to OS 6. At least for this particular issue, it wouldn't be. And the warranty issue that user exposed sadly confirms the downfall of the ReadyNAS group at Netgear. While I used to support and push their products, I can't do so for this thread or for future NAS discussions.

Agreed. Time Machine is a thing of beauty when you see it in action. After Tom helped my girlfriend recover some data files from a crashed Macbook hard disk, we vowed to make sure she had better backups. I got her a small USB external hard disk that she backs up to with Time Machine, and it's super effective.

I also had the option of making her Time Machine backup be a file on our Synology NAS, but we opted for the external drive because it was faster to backup and restore, and it has a better, faster, and more direct route to recovery if her hard disk goes completely down again.

I've had problems doing that; the backup doesn't always run, and it often decides to blow the entire backup away and do it again from scratch.

The first problem could be down to the fact that I don't use the Mac that often: my daily computer is a Linux Mint desktop; the Mac is only for when I'm out. It takes weeks until it actually gets around to installing updates as well (this is something that Windows Update gets right, imo).

I might just get an external disk for the Mac instead.

I've looked at backup for my NAS, and I still haven't come up with one that I like. Currently all of my important files are on a Windows 2012 box, and I use BackupAssist to external disks for that.

I've never bothered trying to get network TimeMachine working, I've heard far too many horror stories. I just have an external drive that my MacBook is plugged into at my desk. That is a TM drive and I also have SuperDuper set up to clone my MacBook drive to the same external drive a couple of times a week.

I built my own file server last year, I was tempted by FreeNAS but instead went with an Ubuntu install in the end. I wanted to be able to run various Virtual Box VMs on the server and while I know FreeNAS can do that it felt like I needed a general OS rather than a NAS specific setup.

I wouldn't want to be without ZFS (or something similar). I have a script setup to test the drives daily, so I'll know within a day if any sort of bit rot starts happening. There is no point having all this data and backing it up if you don't know whether it is corrupted or not, right ?

I have three drives in the server, setup in a ZFS mirror. That means that if the server ever dies I can just grab a single drive, put it in another machine and be up and running quickly.

I use CrashPlan for backup. I have it running on my MacBook to backup everything to CrashPlan running on the file server. The MacBook also backs up selected data direct to CrashPlan's cloud storage.

The Linux CrashPlan client also runs on the file server, backing up the entire ZFS array.

The server also runs my Squeezebox server, Unifi controller for my wifi, my FLAC-MP3 encoder script and my pfSense* router. All of those run in Virtual Box VMs, so again if the server hardware fails I can be up and running on other hardware by just pulling one drive.

I don't use AFS/Netatalk, I've never found it reliable, so I just use Samba/SMB.

* yes, my router runs in a VM. I have three network cards in the server, one is shared by the host OS and pfSense as the LAN. The other two are only used by the pfSense VM, each one goes to a DSL modem with a PPPoE connection.

My problem is that I'm trying to create a central storage location for things like the photos and videos my wife and I take with our phones and cameras. What do you do for that? There's far too much to store on our computers (particularly with newer computers with tiny SSDs), and I don't really like the idea of only keeping them on the cloud.

Yep, that's the main issue with using a non Apple destination for Time Machine, and it appears the newer Netatalk stacks don't fully solve the issue.

The setups I've done with an Apple hardware piece in the mix (Time Capsule or the newer Airport Extreme) have been solid. And thankfully the units I helped with never ran into the overheating deaths many of the first Time Capsule units experienced.

For the family, the Time Capsules are becoming less important though. This Christmas will be the point I migrate the last member up to iCloud Photo Library. Any old documents they had from their now unused Macbook will move into iCloud Drive and be accessible via the iPad. Slowly, my own setup is moving in this direction.


If you have a Mac that supports PowerNap, it will take care of a Time Machine backup and system update downloading while the system is inactive and in low power mode.

Thanks for the insights, everyone, especially on pointing out the unreliability of Time Machine to non-Apple network drives. That tip has just saved me a large amount of time and headache!

This is starting to feel like one of those "just pick something" tasks.

Unless I want to build my hardware, you get more bang-for-the-buck with Synology, than with something like the FreeNAS Mini. For example, the diskless Mini has 4 drive bays, 16GB ECC RAM (expandable to 32GB) for $995. For $960, I can get a Synology DS1815+, which is 8 drives (expandable to 18), but only 2GB DDR3 RAM (expandable to 6GB).

Synology pros -- more room for expansion, better form factor
Synology cons -- no ECC RAM, no ZFS

FreeNAS Mini pros -- ECC RAM, ZFS
FreeNAS Mini cons -- no room for expansion.

Beyond that, the capability list between Synology NAS and FreeNAS appears to be pretty much the same.

So, how much does ECC RAM matter? How much does ZFS matter, assuming RAID6 vs RAIDZ2?

At the moment, we probably only have a couple TB of data, so expansion isn't critical at this point. But then aside from the music sitting on the empeg, I haven't ripped any media yet.

I do wish I'd gone for ECC in my server, the memory is definitely a weak point. It is all very well having ZFS, but I could still get memory corruption and therefore end up with corrupted data carefully written to all three of my mirrored drives.

ZFS does matter in my opinion, you don't get the checksumming peace of mind with plain RAID.

Well, after a lot of thought, I ended up going the build-it-myself route. Since the NAS is primarily for business and backups, I felt that data integrity was something I didn't want to skimp on, so ECC and ZFS were a hard requirement. But the FreeNAS Mini's restriction to 4 drives still didn't sit well with me, either. After a bunch of research, I ended up with:

UNAS-NSC800 chassis. I'm super impressed with the quality of this case, and would happily recommend it to anyone else. There are not many options for small form-factor cases with >4 hot-swap drive bays. This case comes at a premium over the one other case I could find, but that case would require using a drive bay as space for a PCI-e card.

SuperMicro A1SAi-2750F motherboard. Low power SoC, Intel Atom Avoton. The FreeNAS Mini uses an ASROCK mobo with the same chipset, with 12 SATA ports. The Supermicro only has 6, but I've been reading reports that people have been having problems with the NICs on the ASROCK mobo.

Supermicro PWS-203-1H Power Supply 200W 80-plus Gold rated. This was a mistake. I was looking at 1U power supplies that had a maximum length to fit in the case, and that weren't overkill. This seemed like it was the best option, based on power requirements. But I didn't check all of the dimensions of the PS or the chassis -- I (foolishly) made the assumption that a 1U power supply has a standard form factor in terms of width and height. Well, this one is designed to fit into a SuperMicro chassis, and it does not mount in the above case -- it's much too small, being almost (but not quite) Flex ATX. And no-one makes a mounting bracket, either. But rather than admit defeat, send it back, and find a different one, I opted to make my own mounting bracket from some 20ga sheet aluminum I had in the garage. That took a good two weeks of measuring (bought some new digital calipers, so win-win, right?), CAD (in OnShape.com), and metal work, but I was still waiting for parts to arrive, so whatever. I learned new stuff, and had fun. I made some mistakes, too -- Perfect-me wants to re-make the bracket, but since the worst mistakes are hidden on the inside of the case, Practical-me wins out, and I've moved on.

LSI SAS 9211-8i PCI-e HBA The chassis comes wired with a SAS/SATA backplane pre-wired with SAS cables, and since the mobo only had 6 sata ports itself, I'll need something when the time comes to fill the case. Easier to get it now, than later. It would have been nice to have had an external port in addition to the two internal ports (to be even more comparable to the Synology DS1815+), but I figure that since I'm only populating 4 drive bays now, by the time I populate the other 4 drives (with even higher capacity drives), fill those, and need to expand a third time, I'm probably several years away, if not more.

4 x 4TB WD Red HDD I'm not sure how satisfied I am with these, yet -- I discovered after purchase that some Red models still have the head-parking issue that the WD Greens did, so now I have to do the legwork to make sure that they're set correctly. I'm sort of wishing I'd gone with Seagate, now.

2 x 8GB ECC DDR3-1600 RAM

All in, cost was roughly the same as the FreeNAS Mini (but with more expandability) and Synology DS1815+ (but with better hardware).

Overall, I'm happy.

Having IPMI has been very nice, but there's been a learning curve to it, as the documentation is... sparse. For example, to mount a virtual floppy (I needed to re-flash firmware on the LSI card), it says you can upload a file that's named as .img or .ima. It took a couple hours to discover that uploading the image as a .img doesn't work, it has to be a .ima file. Installing FreeNAS via mounting a virtual CD was a breeze.

On to stage 2 -- configuration.

Thank you all for your input. It was very helpful.

Heh.

I'm sure quite a few of us have done similar things. I can think of lots of instances where I built an adapter for something myself instead of just buying the right part in the first place. Heck, the fact that you're rolling your own NAS is yet another example of the same thing.



Have you seen that there are WD red 6tb models now? I'm trying a pair in my Synology right now. So far so good.

I did, but the 4TB drives felt like the sweet-spot for price/capacity. I'm running raidz2, so the 4x4 gives me 8TB useable space, which is more than double what we really need right now. I couldn't justify the additional $400 price tag to go from 8TB to 12TB. By the time we run out of space again, I'm hoping the prices will have dropped significantly, as 8TB (and hopefully above) drives are a little more ubiquitous.

Awesome, thanks for the post about what solution you went with. I may look to address my personal NAS situation late next year or sometime in 2017, and would be interested on how it goes with FreeNAS.

Sometime before that happens, my personal server for mail is likely to move from CentOS to FreeBSD. I kinda want to remove anything Linux from my personal side for a variety of reasons. As nice as my (pre BTRFS) ReadyNAS units have been, it's time to stop the bitrot and other data corruption going on as I am trying to cart forward decades of digital stuff.

My pleasure! Ping this thread again when you're ready, and I'll let you know how I've gotten on. So far, the only thing I really wish is that their next version were out. The 10.x alpha looks much nicer from a design/feature standpoint, but... alpha.


Well, if you have a mix of Linux/OS X, I'd probably drop Linux in favour of FreeBSD/OpenBSD, as well.

That's what I'm hoping to prevent. I have some photo CDs that need to be put back online, before they're unreadable. Given that it's been >10 years, I'm just hoping I'm not too late.

Huh. This could change up some NAS options on both the DIY and off the shelf type to have ZFS on Linux. I think I'm still on a path to rid my personal life of Linux, though this might help breath some new life into my existing ReadyNAS hardware before that happens.

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/z...lts-by-default/


My personal side, been sorting and reorganizing data still. Trying to get an accurate scope of what I want to carry forward on a NAS to avoid under or over buying storage. The 3 months of funemployment between contracts was useful for getting more DVDs ripped and deduping a bunch of other data.

One new goal I might try, have the data on the NAS searchable via OS X Spotlight. The only slightly solid route here seems to be a Mac server with iSCSI or direct attached disks. Been following Marco Arment's adventures with this on a Synology NAS and 3rd party iSCSI initiators for OS X. This idea appeals to me for also having a better CPU around for my Plex server then what sits inside most home off the shelf NASes.

3rd party RAID box (on a mac in this case but it doesn't matter) sadly did me wrong, and being basically unemployed, suddenly in the midst of a divorce and functionally homeless means the box is sitting idle waiting for me to have money to bring it online. I have to say, an iSCSI enclosure (and keeping the same Mac Mini) is mighty appealing

Tom, you may have mentioned this already in another thread, in which case I missed it, but mind if I ask why you want to get rid of Linux?

I've not discussed the reasons fully here yet, and it's tied up in some longer form writing I'm working on. Goal is to have it all written up and posted here among other places in the next few months.

The Linux angle has a small thread into overall massive discoveries of self and awareness of the world that came from the past 3 years of crisis in my personal and professional lives.

I am interested in how this is working for you, since I am looking at moving in a similar direction myself.

Originally I was looking at updating my Synology NAS to a new model running btrfs but I have read too many stories about btrfs being somewhat unreliable still, so I have decided to go with the more mature ZFS.

I would probably go with the same mobo as you but use the 4-bay U-NAS case instead.

If you could update the thread I would be grateful, thanks!

In general, I'm pretty happy with the purchase. From a hardware standpoint, there hasn't been a lick of trouble -- though that other thread is a reminder that I really should check the drive temps. I haven't looked at them at all. I have the 4 drives in a Z2 array (2 drive redundancy). Aside from the power supply issue, everything went into the case just fine, but it's a *really* tight fit for the mobo. There is not a lot of space. The fans are quiet enough that I've never noticed them while working in the office. The drives make more noise than the fans, IMO, but I have tinnitus, so maybe I just don't notice.

On the software side, it's been a mixed bag. The two sore points for me: 1) configuring it to use as a print server, and 2) crashplan.

1) Setting up a jail with CUPS is trivial. My printer has a wireless network option, but a) it's finicky at best, and b) it can only be configured wirelessly if the wireless network is configured in an insecure manner, so we use it with USB. Unfortunately, no-one seems to know how to get FreeNAS to provide permissions to access the USB device to the non-root users of a jail. FreeNAS appears to configure their jails just slightly different from stock FreeBSD, so that the guidelines for FreeBSD don't work. The response from FreeNAS contributors with respect to USB devices is along the lines of "FreeNAS is only for storage, the developers don't intend it to be used for things like that, so won't spend time developing it." Which, of course, isn't how FreeNAS is marketed. But anyway. This is solvable, I just haven't spend the time to do so, since my Linux desktop is doing an adequate job for the time being.

2) Crashplan. Ugh. Yes, there is a crashplan plugin. I have had nothing but problems with it. There are loads of people out there who have nothing but problems with it, and their searches for assistance all seem to be met with "but it works flawlessly for me." Well, it doesn't. Code42 appears to not have any backward compatibility in their client software. If the client software isn't the same version as what's running on the server, the two won't communicate. The FreeNAS crashplan plugin was packaged with an old 3.x version of the client software, and current version is now 4.x. It's supposed to auto-update, but the auto-update failed. I have tried a) re-installing the plugin, b) installing an x server and vnc server to run it non-headless, c) installing a normal jail with linux compat and installing the crashplan without the plugin, and d) giving up. I will not be using crashplan. Instead, I'll just rsync my linux desktop, and install the rsync-based iBackup on the macs, and let ZFS do its snapshot magic. I'm still not settled on cloud storage yet. rsync.net's ZFS replication is nice, but extremely expensive -- they claim it's due to enterprise-class support, but I don't need enterprise-class support, I just need an end-point for a ZFS send command. I'm currently looking at Backblaze B2, with duplicity.

Other than that, I'm happy on the software side, too.

The plex server plugin works just fine. I've had no issue streaming/transcoding H.265 videos to an ipad. Setting up jails, storage, users, snapshot schedules, etc is easy too. It would be nice if there were a simple button to set up recommended snapshot intervals for a data set, but that's a pretty minor point.

The majority of the issues I've had have been 3rd party integration. For example, I needed to tell her mac book to index the NAS drives, so that she could use Spotlight. And I couldn't use my regular gmail account for the SMTP settings, without turning off security settings (so rather than set up another gmail account, I signed up for an SMTP relay service).

The only thing I wish I had done was max out the memory supported by the mobo, but that's really a temporary issue. I'm using the server evaluate CRM systems for the theatre, so I have a couple of jails set up running apache/wordpress/mysql installations. Once we make our choice, one of those will go away, and the other turned off except for dev/testing purposes.

From the standpoint of using the box as a NAS, it's been a set-n-forget operation, just as I'd hoped. It just sits there, ticking away.

Thanks for the update and glad to hear it is positive overall.



I would imagine that the 8-bay case with 2 x 120mm fans should be pretty quiet and keep the drives nice and cool too. If I remember correctly, that mobo has PWM fan controllers so you should be able to slow the fans down if required. The 4-bay case only has the one fan but I think it should still be OK. I would say the noisiest fan would be the small one in the PSU.



After checking out the FreeNAS forums, I stumbled across NAS4Free which is a fork of the original FreeNAS. Judging by the comments on this blog, N4F is considerably less resource-intensive than FN but at the cost of limited functionality eg plugins.



That is good news about the transcoding, I understand H.265 is pretty intensive to transcode? The lack of this sort of functionality is why N4F has lower hardware requirements.




How do you achieve this, I would like to use Spotlight on my current Synology NAS too?




That's how it should be!

Same link I used.

I checked the drives the other night -- all 4 running at 35C. That's with all drives on the left hand side. I didn't skip any drive bays when I put the drives in.


It does, but I'm not sure if FreeBSD/FreeNAS supports that. There's certainly nothing in the FreeNAS UI, and I haven't bothered to dig for the info on FreeBSD.


Yup. Some people have swapped the case fans with more expensive fans with better bearings, but I haven't seen the need.


I saw N4F, and discarded it as an option pretty quickly. I liked that FreeNAS has a company throwing resources at it. If I don't use the plugins, then I'll see roughly the same resource usage.


Yes. Gotta put those 8 cores to use somehow, right.

Thanks Andy, I'll give it a go next week.

Well I am one step forward, I got indexing working using the mdutil procedure from the link but only after I updated to the latest DSM operating system and enabled AFP.

Now OSX Finder searches on the NAS work and are very fast but Spotlight is not picking up the NAS, any ideas?

None, here. I don't even know if it's working correctly for my wife. I ran the thing in the link, and left it at that. She hasn't complained, anyway.

I did a bit more digging and it appears as if the NAS must do the indexing for Spotlight if this Apple discussion post is correct. That does not seem to be happening by any NAS vendors at the moment.

Anyway, I will leave it for the time being, I am grateful that I can search my NAS via Finder now, which I could not do before. Sorry for the thread hijack.