I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid.
Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies:
* Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in.
* FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it.
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* Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility.
Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later.
You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term.
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ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it.
I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.
Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone)
Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS.
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* Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box.
Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.
>I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.
Which can massively accelerate small file load times. Using this on a VM pool greatly speeds things up.
>Also ZFS has compression which can drastically reduce data usage.
Which in some virtual environments decreased our data usage by 50 times or more.
Windows storage spaces suck balls on speed. Using it in the Microsoft recommend methods to avoid data loss or corruption make it even slower.
Oh, and just throwing files on ReFS and using it directly with services and such is a great way to get weird issues if you don't understand the filesystem are different.
>while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size
Specific number of disks. You increase the disks size and you can grow you raid.
Both FreeNAS and NAS4Free are nothing more than FreeBSD with some GUI stuff pasted on. I am comfortable using ssh and [ba]sh, so I couldn't care less about the GUI. I just use the real thing: FreeBSD.
Start your flamewars nerds!
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I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid.
Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies:
* Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in.
* FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it.
-------
* Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility.
Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later.
You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term.
--------
ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it.
I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.
Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone)
Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS.
--------
* Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box.
Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.