I’ve tried FreeNAS on many occasions over the years. I never really thought very highly of it as it always seemed amateurish and cobbled together. It also never really handled disk failures very well as it had a tendency to freeze up instead of taking the disk offline and sending a proper notification. Then again, the last time I used seriously was version 7 so I’m hoping that all that has been resolved in 9. I’m glad they kept the ability to install to flash media.
Last time I attempted to use FreeNAS I was having issues with CIFS/SMB performance between the FreeNAS box and several media streaming devices. Hopefully this is now resolved.
Installation was pretty straight forward, except for a minor issue during the initial post install boot where the boot process seems to hang for 10 minutes with no output to the console. This is apparently “normal”.
The interface/management is pretty straight forward. I tested a few failure scenarios and FreeNAS seemed to have handled that quite nice. ZFS Performance seems to be pretty decent. Will definitely take another look at this once all preliminary testing is complete
Pros:
– Installs onto flash device leaving drive free bays for storage purposes
– Straight forward, intuitive management interface
– Plugin support (live download)
– ZFS Support
– Disk failure emails
– Replication
– SMB3 support (multichannel support coming)
Issues:
– Requires command line for certain tasks (e.g. zpool clear)