Re: [PLUG] EXTERNAL: FreeNAS vs. Debian for my simple home NAS

I had posted on this forum for some ideas about a problem I had. Basically I have a couple XBMC clients with SAMBA connections to a Windows “File Server”. They would connect to the file server about 30% of the time. I kept playing with the configuration but I could never figure out the problem.

Some suggestions were just like what you did, but I am new to Linux sysadmin, and my time at home is limited so I used NAS4Free. Installation/configuration was easy and quick. About a year later I cannot recall any one of the XBMC clients having any issues with connecting to NAS4Free. My configuration is very simple; no RAID. A mix of internal and external drives.

The price of drives is steadily falling, so I may pony up for a stack of 2T/3T drives in a proper RAID configuration.

The only “weakness” in my configuration is that some of the drives are NTFS. One of these days when I have time then I will fix that. Probably when the drive crashes…

From: plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org [mailto:plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org] On Behalf Of Adam Zion
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 3:03 PM
To: PLUG
Subject: EXTERNAL: [PLUG] FreeNAS vs. Debian for my simple home NAS

OK, so I've got my roll-your-own NAS up and running like so:

Ancient Dell Dimension (headless after I got everything up and running)
Crunchbang Linux (Debian-based)
SAMBA
2 1 TB USB2 drives (amazingly, the ancient Dell has USB2 ports)
SAMBA shares on one of the USBs
Nighly rsync copies from one drive to the other to make a de facto RAID 1

Ain't pretty, and uses a lot more W of electricity than the Raspberry Pi-based NAS would have, but it works.

My question is: would there be any advantage to using FreeNAS (or NAS4Free) on this device vs. remaining w/Crunchbang?

-Z

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Adam+Zion, MSIS, MCSE+I
Registered Linux User #471910
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/azion1995