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
Personally, I'd run the bonnie++ benchmark from the command line without the Nexenta wrapper.
First, you'll need to log in as the root user and get into the full command shell mode using:
option expert_mode = 1 followed by !bash
Answer y the prompt that says You are about to enter the Unix ("raw") shell and execute low-level Unix command(s).
From here, you can download and install the proper bonnie++ executable.
# Update the apt package database
root@nyx:/volumes# apt-get update
# Install bonnie++
root@nyx:/volumes# apt-get install bonnie++
# Change to the target directory
root@nyx:/volumes# cd /volumes/Data1/your.cifs.folder
At this point, you can run a bonnie benchmark with or without parameters.
I usually run bonnie++ -u root -n 64:100000:16:64, but you'll be fine running bonnie++ -u root inside of the directory you wish to work in.
Post your results. There are a few tweaks needed for Nexenta when used without SAS or SCSI disks. You should at least see 80-90MB/s sequential write speed to a RAIDZ array. Read speed should be better than that.
Best Answer
Let's start by saying that since this is for a home lab it really doesn't matter one way or another unless you have some business need to go with one solution over another. By business need I mean to gain experience with a particular application in order to put it on your resume.
I personally do not like NexentaStor because it doesn't provide an UI based way to limit your storage traffic to either a particular NIC or a particular network segment. You can of course hack that in via iptables but I couldn't be bothered.
There's another option which is OpenIndiana. There are a whole bunch of different resources on the net in terms of implementing ZFS. One very helpful resource with a lot more information than your average SF reply can be found at Hardforum: OpenSolaris derived ZFS NAS/ SAN (Nexenta*, OpenIndiana, Solaris Express) . The folks are Hardforum are extremely helpful and knowledgeable and with over 500 replies to that thread you'll find a wealth of information posted by folks who actually implemented different scenarios and give an unbiased view of the pros and cons.