I'm planning on using FreeNAS (was considering openfiler but freenas seems simpler) for my home NAS box running off ESXI. I have managed to get local sata drives to mount in ESXI (ESXi add datastore without partitioning).
I've had one of the drives fail on my before and I was able to retrieve most of the data off it using windows tools (I'm not much of a linux guy I know enough to be dangerous!).
If I go the freenas route in the event that something goes bad what would be the best file system to use so that I could pop the drive out of the freenas box (vm) and put it in another pc running windows so I could try and run various recovery tools to get the data back.
All in all its not a major problem if I lose the data just would be a bit annoying, so I'm not looking for suggestions around backing up etc.
I was considering using NTFS that the drives are already formatted as but it appears that while freenas does support NTFS that its a bit buggy and not 100% reliable, anyone know if this is still true? Read that on a forum somewhere.
Best Answer
Windows recovery tools understand exactly two formats: NTFS and FAT. Unfortunately for you, neither are good choices for FreeNAS. FAT is too old to be useful, and NTFS is not as reliable as the other filesystems available for FreeNAS; not only does it not journal, the code-path isn't as robust as NTFS-on-Windows or EXT2/EXT3/XFS-on-Linux so there be bugs lurking.
NTFS can work on FreeNAS, it's just not a good idea.