After nine months of FreeNAS use, I thought it might be nice to review my experiences.
My experiment, for those who don’t recall, I purchased a refurbished Dell Optiplex GX260 Tower P4 2.0GHz 512MB 40GB XP Pro for $180 plus $40 shipping ($220 total) and two 500 Gig IDE hard drives for $130 each. Total cost was $480. I installed FreeNAS on it and have been using it as a server ever since.

The software RAID did not play well with the power management, so I opted to use RSYNC each night to back up the data from the primary 500 gig drive to the secondary/backup drive.

I’ve talked in past posts about the positive aspects, so I want to point out a few of the shortcomings I’ve observed.

First, the speed is not that great. It’s generally fast enough, except when you want to do a full backup to a drive over the network. For disaster recovery, I do like to have an external USB drive that has a backup of the server. I had originally configured this as a Linux EXT2 partition but FreeNAS did not write reliably to this format. Due to large file sizes (over 4gig), I didn’t want to use FAT32. NTFS didn’t work much at all with FreeNAS. So, after the failure of any of the non-native file formats to work reliably, I was left with only one option and that was to back it up over the network. I may set it up to use DeltaCopy to RSYNC. But a complete backup is painfully slow and not recommended except for your initial backup.

Another issue is security. I’m not concerned about local loop security, but one of my goals was to have Internet access. If I leave my SSHD enabled, script kiddies will try to hack my password with a brute force attack. While it’s not likely they will succeed due to my non-standard UID and well-formed password, I just didn’t like the fact that my machine was getting hit all the time. So now I just enable the SSHD as needed. I’d prefer a more robust security mechanism but due to the limited architecture of FreeNAS this is trickier than I want to mess with.

FreeNAS is still beta. It’s a small project with few developers. It’s also built on what is probably a dying OS, in FreeBSD. Linux would be more stategic. I realize the purpose of FreeNAS is to be a very lightweight OS, that runs on low end hardware, but with my machine, I really have the horsepower to run a Linux server. In fact, with the cost of the same machine now down to $170 delivered, and hard drives being even cheaper (I’ve picked up SATA 500Gig drives for $70 delivered, but don’t know the cost of IDE drives required for the GX260) I’m not sure there’s a need for something like FreeNAS that runs on the lowest end hardware. This makes me think FreeNAS is less strategic overall.

Another issue I’ve had is I haven’t been able to successfully upgrade to later builds. And I’m almost afraid to try it again at this point. I’m just living with the devil I know.

After nine months of use, I am also looking to see if I am actually using the wide range of functionality that FreeNAS does provide. It is nice to be able to access my files from anywhere on the ‘net’ but I use this so seldomly. The redundant data is a ‘must have’ feature, but one that I can implement in other ways. My home computing picture has changed a bit. I used to have an Ubuntu workstation, my dual boot WinXP/Ubuntu laptop and two WinXP desktops. I’ve retired the Ubuntu workstation and an older XP desktop, so I’ve now got two clients on my network. I’ve moved most of my computing off the desktop since it is slower than my desktop. In fact, the desktop will probably become a makeshift DVR for my living room HDTV. So, I probably don’t need a server at all.

So, my plan will be to ‘wean’ myself off the server and consolidate my computing to one desktop. Then, I’ll look into changing my FreeNAS box into an Ubuntu server where I can host some web sites. Once I get upgraded DSL in my neighborhood, I may move to a self-hosting solution for all my public web sites and just host them on the GX260 box.

I am still liking the GX260 though it would have been better to get something that supports SATA.

In conclusion, FreeNAS does a decent job, but it is what it is – kind of slow and not easily expanded. If it dies and I can’t resurrect a working FreeNAS or FreeBSD box, my data on the existing FreeBSD native partitions is unusable by windows and I’d have to try reading them from Ubuntu or build a FreeBSD box to rescue the data. This is too high a risk for me. However, if you need the unique feature set of FreeNAS and want something relatively easy to set up in a nice ‘package’, then I have found FreeNAS to be reliable, and never need rebooting. In fact, after the initial setup, it’s only been rebooted due to power failures and attempted upgrades.