Configuring FreeNAS on Hardware RAID

I have been using freenas on a spare machine with 4x 1TB hard drives (2 raid 1's, so 2TB usable). It has been up 24/7 for 6 months.

I find it brilliant!

I tested many NAS's devices and only got a maximum of 10Mb/s on a gigabit port, and that was rare, typically it was around 3-4. My main reason for a device was to save energy, however 2x 2 drive nas's = more than a 80+% psu on a celeron system.

On freenas, I have a celeron based machine that cost me under £70, and on the internal 100Mb card, I can easily push 70Mb/s on samba.

The most expensive part was I bought a 4 drive enclosure to add/remove hard drives easily! Was a bit of a waste of money, but looks cool!

I can not complain at all about it and love the system. I did look at openfiler, but it seemed a bit OTT and freenas did what I needed...

To the others who recommended it, not saying Openfiler is bad, but freenas suited my needs perfectly, I boot the machine off of a USB stick and works well... The question was "is FreeNAS reliable" and my answer has to be yes.

The system is using software raid and even though the celeron is a single core 64 bit one, even during a raid rebuild + watching a HDTV episode across the network, it never goes above 60% cpu

To get it working, I downloaded the full iso, put a 1GB usb stick in my laptop, used usb pass through on Vmware Workstation and booted from the iso. I then used the install option and chose the USB stick. (You can do this on the actual machine and I have since however this was my first time using it and I couldn't find a blank cd!)

I put the usb stick in to the machine and booted. It worked fine first time!

Steps to actually get it usable as a nas were the following:

1. Go in to disk management and add each of the 4 drives.
2. Go to format and format all drives to software raid
3. Go to software raid and add disks 1 and 2, 3 and 4 to a new raid 1
4. Go to format and format both the new raid's to the standard os
5. Mount both raids
6. Set up Samba and choose both of the mount points as shares
7. Set up a couple of users

Then it was accessible over windows by \\ip and using the username and password I chose.

I will be looking at openfiler again soon as AD support is lacking a bit, however for a SOHO / domainless environment, you can not go wrong with freenas.

edit - Via request - Was to big to fit in comments

Usually, the onboard controllers are fakeraid devices, so if you're building a linux server, you'll be better off with software raid (mdX) instead.

afaik if you're planning on a hardware raid solution, you'll need a proper controller, like LSI (or variants - dell PERC/IBM ServeRaid/etc), or 3WARE - all of them are very rare onboard, and pretty expensive.