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
Sounds like you should consider ZFS mirroring. Start off with a mirror of the 1TB disks you have now and then when you add additional drives, add mirrored pairs of same-sized disks too the pool. Once you've filled all six drive bays, you can replace the smaller disks with larger ones and increase overall pool capacity (e.g. replace a 500GB disk with a 2TB disk and let it resilver. Then replace the 2nd 500GB disk with a 2TB disk and let it resilver. On next mount you'll have 1.5TB more free space.
RAIDz is fine if you have a lot of data and want to maximize your available space (at the expense of CPU overhead, IOPS performance and expandability) but with RAIDz (like RAID5) you need to have equal sized disks (or wasted space) and decide how many disks you want in the set at creation time. Technically, with 6 disks you could start with a 3 disk RAIDz with equal sized drives and when expanding you could add a second 3 disk RAIDz set, but life's too short for stupid things like that. Just go with mirroring.
Best Answer
We were recently in the same situation, and no, unfortunately FreeNAS is not ready for the enterprise. With 8.0.1, we had tons of issues with Active Directory integration working intermittently, as well as periodic lockups. All you need to look at are the change logs for recent beta releases to see that there are still major bugs being addressed in the 8.0 series.
Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when it comes to storage. We were just going to use FreeNAS as a backup target, but it wasn't stable enough for that task, much less stable enough as primary VMware storage.