Alternatives to FreeNAS

[Boltorano]

I was looking into spending about $40 upgrading my old ancient PC to a quad core CPU and converting it into a home server.

I thought FreeNAS was somewhat directed at the home user market, but it seems the developer's stance is that it's for "serious hardware only" and 8GB of RAM is considered the absolute minimum. The motherboard supports that much but it's a budget "one size fits all" board and if they're being that picky about specs and chipsets I'm not sure how well it would work out.

Doing some research, I learned about OpenMediaVault which supports several plugins that I would be interested in, so I guess that's my current fall back option.

[Straight Hustlin]

What exactly are you looking to put on it? If it's just media you can run Plex on a toaster basically.

And just throwing this out there but the Seagate my personal clouds NAS are pretty simple and might be cheaper than upgrading the old box. Think I got my 4tb for like 110

Sent from my XT1565 using Tapatalk

[Boltorano]

I have a ReadyNAS but the firmware hasn't been updated in close to 5 years and doesn't support Plex.

Since I have an old PC and a pile of 500GB drives that aren't throwing SMART errors (yet) so I just wanted to cobble something together temporarily. For $40 I can toss in a CPU more than good enough to do 1080p transcoding and 4GB of DD3.

I do plan to get some 4TB WD Reds or something like that but it's not going to happen for a while.

TLDR I'm poor and don't want to get locked into a proprietary NAS with proprietary hardware again.

[elmicker]

You should strongly consider just buying something new - running years-old consumer hardware as a server will rack up the power bills.

[Boltorano]

Worst case scenario it costs $8/mo in electricty. I expect it be closer to $5.

Edit: I got out the PC and measured the actual power use with drives spinning then doubled it. Comparing that to the power bill that gives me a high end of around $15/mo.

[Doomsayer]

Have a selfbuilt nas with some microatx celeron system-on-chip board running for some years now with openmediavault.
Works excellent though no clue about plex.

If you want to save some energy you can set up a wakeup time in bios and an automatic shutdown in your energymanager.
Mine starts 14:00 and turns off at midnight.
Theres also some plugin that turns it off based on use, can find it on omv-extras.org

Could also setup wake on lan maybe if its off and you need it?

OMV setup is quite easy so you could try it out before upgrading your old system.

[Cosmin]

Whatever you do, steer clear of Segate drives. Please. For your own sake.

[Stoffl]

And whatever you do, steer clear of cosmin posts.

MI8m8

[Keckers]

And whatever you do, steer clear of cosmin posts.

MI8m8

This should be the description for the whole subforum.

[Cosmin]

Yeah, these guys are retarded, they know nothing about HDD reliability

[Boltorano]

I came across that report about a month after buying a pair of ST2000DM001s. They make a strange sound when the heads park but haven't had any trouble so far.

Over a long period of time (15 years or so) I've had more WDs and Toshibas fail than Seagates.

[helgur]

I've ran FreeNAS on my HP microserver for years now with 8gb of ram. As long as you'll be the only one using it and you stay a bit conservative on storage space (not more than 8tb) you'll be fine.

[Stoffl]

Yeah, these guys are retarded, they know nothing about HDD reliability

What is anectodal evidence

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...tats-for-2018/


Listening to Cosmins opinion on anything technical is about as useful as a voucher for a blowjob after you've ripped your dick off.

Just pick the fucking cheapest drive per storage available currently in your region that also fills your requirements (green drive, Raid NAS drives, etc). Then check if there's any known issues. No ? Good.

"Manucaturer X is bad, buy Y" is a fucking retarded statement in the harddrive segment

[Cosmin]

Yikes I missed the 2018 update. Seagate still going strong, but WD Red 6TB seems to be catching up

That statistic is as far from anecdotal evidence as it gets in terms of storage reliability nowadays, considering they're using tens of thousands of drives ffs. If you want to put your data on a 4TB Seagate you deserve losing it if it breaks.


I don't mean to sound biased in terms of HDD manufacturers, but it depends on how they honour warranty as well. WD always replaced my shit. Seagate? Here, have this repaired drive. Oh, you get 30 days warranty. It died 2 months later. FU, Seagate.

Should I mention they way they handle warranties on the portable drives segment as well? My dad (anecdotal evidence ensues) had something like 4 Seagate USB 3.0 drives, different batches, different storage capacities. All dead now, millions/tens of millions of bads on them. Seagate reaction? Uhm yeah we can't help, fuck you. Nobody asked them to actually recover any data (luckily it was backed up), just to replace the drives. Started nitpicking on proof of purchase and similar crap.

[Stoffl]

Lifetime Hard Drive Reliability Statistics
While the quarterly chart presented earlier gets a lot of interest, the real test of any drive model is over time. Below is the lifetime failure rate chart for all the hard drive models in operation as of September 30th, 2018. For each model, we compute their reliability starting from when they were first installed.

Notes and Observations

The failure rates of all of the larger drives (8, 10, and 12 TB) are very good: 1.21% AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) or less. In particular, the Seagate 10TB drives, which have been in operation for over 1 year now, are performing very nicely with a failure rate of 0.48%.
The overall failure rate of 1.71% is the lowest we have ever achieved, besting the previous low of 1.82% from Q2 of 2018.

But please keep posting about your anectodal evidence

[Lana Torrin]

As the proud owner of about 2 dozen wd red 6tb (at work)... Yeah they fucking suck and we are constantly replacing them. Only good thing is wd replace them no questions and we get a full warranty on the new ones.