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:
- Go in to disk management and add each of the 4 drives.
- Go to format and format all drives to software raid
- Go to software raid and add disks 1 and 2, 3 and 4 to a new raid 1
- Go to format and format both the new raid's to the standard os
- Mount both raids
- Set up Samba and choose both of the mount points as shares
- 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
Best Answer
I found the root cause of the problem. The system hides the drive it uses not listed. If you are using a USB drive to your system, you will not have these problems.