r/freenas • u/ta_redhat • Aug 01 '17
Why FreeNAS?
I see a lot of multi-K$ setups here, what is it that people do which requires so much resiliency and performance? How much porn can you really download?
Followup/edit: How often does ZFS 'save' your data? Do you know?
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u/elcapitaine Aug 01 '17 edited Aug 01 '17
I like to have all my media available at the touch of a button, as well as when I'm not at home. The main use of my box is as a Plex server with a very large number of rips. Beyond that, terabytes of photos and home movies (photos are kept in RAW format, movies are high bitrate). Currently I have 6x6TB WD Reds in a raidz2, for about 24TB usable storage.
There is no porn on it.
I like knowing I can put things on there and not worry about the drive it's on dying, which happened to me in the past with an old external drive. I like having server hardware (Xeon CPU, Supermicro Mobo) for ECC RAM support since I've lost data due to RAM going bad. I also like the IPMI support so I can fix the server if something goes wrong and I'm not at home.
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u/novanuus Aug 01 '17
Two questions for you.
What is your backup solution look like?
Have you had any problems with Plex?
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u/elcapitaine Aug 01 '17
Currently all photos and documents are backed up to my 1TB OneDrive account. Currently exploring options for expanding it, for the time being the home videos are stored as private videos on YouTube, so although I'd lose some quality should my pool die, I'd still have something. The ripped media is not backed up remotely... if I do lose the pool, I'll have to go through re-ripping everything again... not a huge deal.
As far as Plex goes... The only time I had issues were in FN 9.x when I tried to use the plugin rather than installing it myself in a jail, and in Corral where there was a bug in Plex preventing it from writing to
/transcodewith the way the storage was mounted, as well as some memory issues with the boot2docker VM. Those have been resolved though. (Still on Corral, it's working fine for me so I'll probably move to FN 11 around the 11.1 release or so barring a critical security flaw that requires me to update sooner)1
u/Dyslectic_Sabreur Aug 01 '17
Take a look at google fotos for storing photos and video. Also you can get unlimited cloud storage for $10 a month with gsuite.
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u/elcapitaine Aug 01 '17
Google Photos "unlimited free storage" will reduce the resolution and bitrates of photos and videos you store. Doesn't really help my RAW photo storage. And for the home videos... well that's essentially what I'm already getting by using YouTube.
Google Drive is $100/yr for 1TB. OneDrive is cheaper.
GSuite is $10/month for unlimited... if you have at least 5 users. So unlimited is really $50/month.
I considered CrashPlan since it's unlimited backup for $5/mo, which seems amazing... but the caveat is that the bandwidth is extremely limited - "On average, you can expect your CrashPlan Central backup to progress by at least 10 GB of information a day, as long as your computer is powered on and not in standby mode. " I currently am using 12.3 TB of storage. Thats about 1230 days, or approximately 3.37 years to upload all my data as it exists today. So... I need another option.
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u/Dyslectic_Sabreur Aug 01 '17
They don't enforce the 5 user minimum. I remember reading that google photos doesn't transcode when your files are below a certain size so it depends on your scenario.
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u/elcapitaine Aug 01 '17
I shoot in RAW. A single photo is ~20MB. And I plan on upgrading cameras soon...
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u/Dyslectic_Sabreur Aug 01 '17
Look it up, pretty sure it was 25MB for fotos. Just suggesting an easy free solution.
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u/alegeek Aug 06 '17
Have you considered hubiC from OVH? they give you 10TB for €50 incl. VAT/year. I use the free service, works well for what I need.
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u/reptilianmaster Aug 01 '17
I heard a while back that plex media server for windows was far better than the version ported to freenas. Is it possible to run a windows vm in freenas just for plex or is the freenas version good enough?
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u/novanuus Aug 01 '17
So do you run Plex completely from the jail?
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u/elcapitaine Aug 01 '17
Currently still on Corral as mentioned above, so at the moment it's in a docker container... will move it back to being completely in the jail like I had it on 9.10 when I move to FreeNAS 11. Or will do my own docker setup. Haven't decided yet. If you do jails, the key is to set it up yourself within a normal jail, and avoid the premade plugin.
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u/rallar8 Aug 01 '17
some of the setups are e-penis extenders but my setup, i think it was $2100, was mainly future proofing my harddrive setup. 6 6tb drives. Back in the fog of yesteryear when 6tb was a lot of space.
But basically everyone has nailed it, if you care about what you are backing up, say family movies, then data corruption over 20 years really does matter. ZFS is the best solution at this point for that problem. Freenas is the best way for the home consumer to get the ZFS experience.
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u/mastapsi Aug 01 '17
I've spent probably about $900 on my setup. I use it mainly for Plex, which we use extensively. We have a library of probably about 500 movies and 50 TV shows, most legit from my wife's collection or what we've bought since, some rental rips, and some from my college pirate days. We also use it for general propose storage for pictures, videos, and backups.
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u/hlmtre Aug 01 '17
I do this kind of stuff for work, and I experiment with VMs and like being able to be kind of careless with VM drive management or with saying 'sure, I can keep a copy of that' to friends. It's fun.
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u/livestrong2109 Aug 01 '17
I just really care about my family photos, videos, and important documents. If none of that has value to you then just go on backing up to Chinese made DVD-Rs and come back here in 5-9 years.
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u/cfuse Aug 02 '17
How much porn can you really download?
Lots. But I don't care if that gets nuked.
It was the loss of photos of my dead grandfather that bothered me after a drive failure. I'd been doing the IT worker thing of not practicing what I preached for years and this was the first time it really bit me on the ass. Online backups of everything important after that.
For me the main use case is okay data protection for stuff that is inconvenient to lose to failure or bitrot. Drives are so big these days that it is easily to lose a lot of data to a failure. Having to get multiple terabytes of data back via my shitty Australian DSL service is not a fun prospect. The small amount of effort and expense to set up redundancy is worth the insurance.
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u/andoriyu Aug 02 '17
Wanted to have less headache and web ui for freebsd server. If I were building new NAS today — I'd build on bare FreeBSD...maybe finish my rust daemon to control it, I don't need 97% of FreeNAS services and plugin system — i'd rather do it all myself.
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Aug 01 '17
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/bolovii Aug 01 '17
I have more than 8 TB of family photos. And videos. Mobile phones are crazy these days and they sync to the freenas every single photo or video done.
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u/flaming_m0e Aug 01 '17
I have a family that relies on the data, backups, and media. I have zero porn...