Any good prebuilt NAS or hardware for DIY NAS on FreeBSD?

Str4nd3r666

Str4nd3r666

Any recommendations of good prebuilt NAS or hardware for DIY NAS that is supported by FreeBSD? Does FreeBSD support Raid 1 to 10? Thanks in advance.
 
Didn't we have a thread about enclosures for this within the last 4 months? There was a lot of good information in it, different suggestions on enclosures, power supplies and storage devices.
If you don't want to completely roll your own, a lot of people have mentioned:

XigmaNAS – XigmaNAS

xigmanas.com xigmanas.com
 
It's interesting no one mentioned HP Microservers yet, here or in the older thread. I use them for approx. 15 years now, and they never failed.

My "current" box is a Gen8 with a low power version of a Xeon CPU and 16 GB of RAM.
2x 256 GB SSD ZFS mirror for the system as well as jails and bhyve VMs.
2x 14 TB HDD ZFS mirror for data.

They come with ECC RAM, iLO for remote management, so despite the form factor, it's real server hardware.

Many years ago, I bought different ready-to-use NAS solutions, but I found that for the same money, I am way more flexible with a simple FreeBSD box. I know how my server works because I built it and I have set up every single service myself.

NAS appliances can be really nice if you don't want to do everything yourself, but this is the FreeBSD forum, so roll your own and feel good about it even 5 years later :) Your NAS manufacturer probably won't provide updates for your box in 5 years. I simply freebsd-update my Microserver from.. I don't know.. 2018?
 
Schluppenkalle said:
It's interesting no one mentioned HP Microservers yet, here or in the older thread. I use them for approx. 15 years now, and they never failed.

My "current" box is a Gen8 with a low power version of a Xeon CPU and 16 GB of RAM.
2x 256 GB SSD ZFS mirror for the system as well as jails and bhyve VMs.
2x 14 TB HDD ZFS mirror for data.

They come with ECC RAM, iLO for remote management, so despite the form factor, it's real server hardware.

Many years ago, I bought different ready-to-use NAS solutions, but I found that for the same money, I am way more flexible with a simple FreeBSD box. I know how my server works because I built it and I have set up every single service myself.

NAS appliances can be really nice if you don't want to do everything yourself, but this is the FreeBSD forum, so roll your own and feel good about it even 5 years later :) Your NAS manufacturer probably won't provide updates for your box in 5 years. I simply freebsd-update my Microserver from.. I don't know.. 2018?
Click to expand...
Wow! I didn't know these existed. I've been looking for a small NAS case that could take a bluray drive (I use it for M-DISC backups and makemkv ripping). Are these silent?
 
Relatively speaking, yes. The two HDDs can be heard quite well, but that depends on the model. Other than that, it's ok. Should be silent enough for a living room with SSDs only. When you turn it on or reboot, the POST will crank up the fans to full speed. Sounds like a starting jet for 5 seconds
:)
 
I wrote several posts about the topic NAS with FreeBSD in several threads about the same topic, like
I built me my NAS completely myself, My advice was, You need to look primarily for three things:, It all depends on what you need

Summarized:
  • Don't bother much about the hardware. The most important part is the storage drives anyway. That's what any NAS is all about. Those are always by far the most expensive part(s) of any NAS. You better pick more than one (see next point) new, high quality storage capacity drive. Apart from a not too slow network card the rest of the hardware doesn't matter. Can be slowest used old junk as long as it works, and as long as it provides enough SATA ports. 8GB RAM are enough, more than 16 are overkill (You may evaluate if chosing error correcting RAM.) A NAS has nothing else to do than to operate the drives and the filesystem. So, don't look on CPU or GPU specs. Better look at the PSU! You better try to keep the energy consumption as low as possible: few CPU cores at low frequency, PSU with best efficiency not being too oversized (110...120%), most primitive GPU (just for the case you need a terminal (text only) when things need to be done directly at the machine). Reduce the rest to the max, since that thing is going to run 24/7 and for a NAS you don't need any of that junk anyway.
  • Do a ZFS raid. You don't need to do take the effort to create an own NAS when you don't have any redundancy against hardware failures. IMO mirror is best for two drives, and I prefer a 4 drives raidz2 or an at least 5 drives raidz3 (depends on your situation.)
  • FreeBSD already provides anything needed for an NAS in it's most basic installation (except maybe Samba, if also Windows machines shall have access to it.)
  • If using FreeBSD use ZFS. If using ZFS use its raid capability. If using ZFS' raid capability don't use any other raid system (not needed, plus causes more trouble than it helps.)
 
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