[CentOS] OT: Replacing Venerable NAS

[Devin Reade]

--On Wednesday, November 18, 2015 10:31:36 AM -0500 Tim Evans 
<tkevans at tkevans.com> wrote:

> Would like to hear recommendations here.  Besides the ReadyNAS, I have
> worked with a Thecus NAS (don't recall model). What are the features I
> should look at?

For reasons that others have already touched on, I like FreeNAS, as
long as you're using the base system.  I have one that is running jails
so that I can run some custom software on the same box, and I think
when possible I'd prefer to keep such software off on another machine.
(In this case though, it's a situation of keeping the program as
close as possible to the data to minimize network traffic.)

I have one FreeNAS running on an HP Microserver Gen 8 (four bays,
RAID-Z2 double redundancy, which means two disks worth of usable
space).  The OS is on an internal memory stick, the spinning drives
are all data drives.  It's a nice solid piece of hardware and suitable
for home & small office.

I also have FreeNAS running in a larger system which is based on an
Intel DBS1200V3RPS motherboard, a Xeon processor, lots of ECC memory,
and 36TB of disk.  (6 SATA connectors on board, and 6TB drives were
the largest available at the time; it will get expanded soon via an
add-on RAID card running in JBOD mode.)  It's a solid system.

FreeNAS will do almost anything you'd expect of a storage device.
I'd suggest downloading it and trying it on a spare piece of (64bit)
hardware, but unless it's using ECC memory don't trust your production
data with it.  I've exercised the disk replacement process once and
it went flawlessly.  ('Twas far too early, but it was probably a
manufacturing flaw given the early failure.)

If you're planning on doing data encryption or data duplication, make
sure you read into specific hardware requirements for that before you
go and buy stuff.

And given which mailing list we're on, I'll add in that CentOS 5, 6,
and 7 NFS clients talk to it just fine.  (And OS-X clients as well,
with both NFS and AFP. I don't have windows clients, but they shouldn't
be an issue.)

Devin