FreeNAS alternative

[FN-GM]

Hello,

 

I am looking to create a storage server to dump old data. I used FreeNAS a long time ago and I am out of touch. I was wondering what else is out there? Is there something better maybe?

 

Cheers

[bald_pig]

Can't say I've used anything other than freenas, it's still in development, but some alternatives are listed here:

https://alternativeto.net/software/freenas/

[admars]

i followed a guide and set up an old pc i have using ubuntu as freenas has got more resource hungry from what I read. the ubuntu server is working fine for my needs to copy files to manually for backups. found a guide online which was really easy to follow, the only problem i ran into I fixed, by spelling the names correctly of the folders in the config file

 

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-samba#1-overview

Edited February 24, 2020 by admars

[Arthur]

What's the spec of the storage server?

[LeMarchand]

I had to track down an older version of FreeNAS as the RAM requirement for the current version at the time was way too steep. I always find the initial setup too much like hard work, but then you just seem to be able to forget about it.

[Meldrew]

How about https://www.xigmanas.com/

[andy_b]

Used Openmediavault for a bit. Seemed to work OK and happy with less ram than FreeNAS.

 

Never really got on with UnRaid.

 

Went back to FreeNAS.

[noelmm]

I've used Rockstor | Linux & BTRFS powered Opensource NAS solution in the past and found it to be ok. I was running it on an old machine and it handled it fine.

[mavhc]

I just use debian and zfs, what advantage does freenas etc have?

[3s-gtech]

FreeNAS is turnkey with some pretty impressive features. I used it as an iSCSI NAS with CHAP auth, wasn’t too technical to set up. If I tried to do that on Debian, I could guarantee that it wouldn’t boot after about 15 minutes of changing necessary settings.

 

I don’t have a lot of luck with Linux!

[FN-GM]

What's the spec of the storage server?

 

Its a former Virtual Host. It has 128GB RAM, 7TB Storage & Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2620 CPU.

[mavhc]

I'd only use BTRFS for mirrors, not parity raid. ZFS in raidz2 (raid 6 like) if you don't want to change the number of disks in the raid. You can add a second array to the pool later if you wish, but not change the number of disks in an array (not that you can do that reliably in almost any parity raid system)

[Jobos]

I'm running Freenas on an old PC with Celeron E3300 3GB. Works fine for backups but at the time that's all I had available.

[jmcdermott]

We use https://owncloud.org/ here working very well, on an old box.

[bald_pig]

We use https://owncloud.org/ here working very well, on an old box.

 

While it is an interesting piece of software, it's not an OS. I would recommend trying it if your server has enough spare resources though.

[IKWeb]

Check out UNRAID - Great system.