FreeNAS vs. Unraid: GRUDGE MATCH!

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everybody's like yeah it's the home team yes look at the sports ball go it's not like that at all free NASA none raid have different philosophies there I don't wanna say they're trying to solve different problems in some respects they are but they both need love some different kinds of love and they're not the only solution out there if you saw the video with gamers Nexus where I was summoned through the telecom rack yes that is a thing if to grind up old son processors and they're getting harder to find so but I digress you saw the video that we were trying to find a good solution that has a nice point-and-click GUI now here at level 1 we use ZFS on Linux and the command-line interface is good enough for us but you don't necessarily I mean you can do the command line management and sometimes even with a GUI you're still gonna end up using the command line but it's nice to have automation it's nice to have a dashboard it's nice to be able to see things at a glance doing everything completely manually is not really a badge of honor although I do like watching that primitive technology YouTube channel horde the dude literally does everything manually I mean it's cool to see I just want want to live like that you know what I'm saying it's kinda like that with the GUI so FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and FreeBSD is quite solid it's a great operating system it is philosophically different than Linux unright is based on Linux there has been some controversy around that in the past both of them are really designed to run from a USB stick both of them are designed to give you somewhere to store your stuff both of them are kind of aimed at sort of a home user like home power user ish sort of a workload free Ness is backed by iock systems they offer true Nass a lot of enterprise stuff those guys really know what they're doing and the way that you do things in the enterprise is very different than the way that you do things you know at home just hacking stuff together and so that really brings me to one of the first main differences in the philosophy unread is designed to deal with multiple discs added over time which is something that you would have you know for like a home user or closed scenario let's say that I've got you know 2 8 terabyte hard drives and I'm just gonna mirror them and that's gonna be my set up that's gonna be how I deal with documents and and that kind of thing a min later it's like already terabytes it's not really enough I need to add another 8 terabytes well theoretically I could just buy another 8 terabyte drive and I would have to juggle the redundancy a little bit but theoretically I could set up 3 8 terabyte drives such that any one of them could die and it would lose no information whatsoever in that set up the problem is with ZFS ZFS is a billion dollar filesystem it's amazing it's like having a starship in charge of your file system it is incredible it is an incredible piece of engineering and it solves a lot of problems it wasn't really designed to run on a relatively small number of disks it was designed to run an entire enterprise it was designed to run the enterprise basically I mean in terms of like filesystem capacity and just every metric I can think of except being tuned for blistering performance it ticks all the boxes redundancy replication backup like efficient backup management the deduplication optionally although here there be Tigers don't you know don't necessarily enable deduplication unless you know what you're doing and that's a subject for another day the ZFS is great yes I hear btrfs and other file systems and I actually did some testing before the gamers Nexus thing btrfs has come a long way I was surprised at the survivability of btrs raid 5 & 6 testing it was much better than I expected still not as polished as EFS CFS is much more communicative in terms of like if things have issues or if things are failing or if stuffs acting weird ZFS is much more robust let's say back to the matter at hand freenas versus under 8 so I think under 8 is a little more noob friendly the thing that's the best unright honestly it's the community the community that is working on unwrite is incredible they have done just a phenomenal amount of work so there's a plug-in that you can install and undrained it's sort of the unofficial community plug-in and this is really something that ZFS could take note of here because there are plugins for ZFS that are cool like Plex Media Server and MB and some some other study you know you can do torrents and news groups and all sorts of stuff but the unread ecosystem is much more of a delicious potpourri let's say then the the ZFS system I think the ZFS a-team could take a page from unraised book and maybe make things a little more community accessible like here's the you know the enthusiasts that work for Iook systems are maintaining these plugins and then if we want to color outside the lines a little bit you can have these plugins both of them support virtual machines and jails or docker containers so on under aid the containerization technology is docker you can set up docker containers on unright although the UI is broken in some interesting ways I'll talk about in a second and on FreeBSD you are also able to use docker at the VM but the more proper BSD mechanism is a jail and so there aren't as many ready-made jails out there as there are doctor containers but you can totally use docker containers on FreeBSD so those are about equal in terms of virtual machine support and container support FreeNAS and freebsd basically identical the one place where unread excels in this category is Hardware pass-through the Linux kernel really great support everything's good FreeBSD it's an older version of FreeBSD with FreeNAS beehive is getting to be very mature some things are changing probably gonna have to wait on FreeBSD 12 but by and large you can do hardware pass-through on FreeBSD but not via the FreeNAS GUI and you can't jump through some hoops at the command-line which also wouldn't bother me but not the most stable experience unless you are running bleeding edge so experimented with that a little bit it was not to my liking so ultimately decided to do ZFS on unread and the ZFS on unright is the community supported plugin and unwrite is sort of like alright has this array and the array is this software powered thing that does redundancy and the rebalancing of disks and stuff like that so you can add mismatched disks that can be different sizes you can break all the rules all the rules that you have with ZFS or ZFS is like no you need to add a group of disks at a time for Steve's particular setup we're using a single SSD the single nvme SSD for the array and that is periodically copied to the ZFS array and the ZFS array is made up of eighteen yeah eighteen mechanical hard drives in three V devs so V devs are completely constituent components of a ZFS pool and each V dev is responsible for its own redundancy so he has four or fourteen terabyte drives in a raid Z one and then there are two six drive raid-z two pools that contribute to that and that makes his storage array and so that many spindles mean that you have no problem saturating 10 gig Ethernet it's really fast even though it's mechanical hard drives and we don't really have to get too much into the whole SSD caching thing because with video files and not really random access thing sort of stuff docker so the next thing is steam cache we want to be able to do steam cache the problem is that the unread go is not sophisticated enough to allow you to run multiple containers with a single IP address this is of course no problem for dr. docker absolutely will allow you to do this the problem is that when you're going to run docker multiple containers on a single IP address the IP address has to be bound to the system and not the container if you bind an IP address to the container then the container gets to pick what ports it uses and so with the steam contained like the DeLand cache docker containers that are pre-made ready to go for this there's an sni proxy which runs on port 443 so that HTTP requests work for the kinds of things the steam wants to do and Windows Update and things like that those are passed through unchanged any any encrypted request is not going to be able to be cached locally and then port 80 that is all rewritten and served from a local cache those are two different docker containers but they need to run on the same IP address not really a way to do that through docker are through the unread GUI but you can totally deal with docker so I had to write a script to do that and I had to use it another user plug-in to me hole to run scripts on a schedule the full guide for that is on the level 1 forum but like there's no sane interface for cron there was no st. interface for being able to run user scripts even customizing the the Sam but performant or the Samba interface there is the SMB extra confident unread but not that I mean you can change it in the UI in the backend but it's not the best user interface those user plugins the user the community is really where the value comes from on unread because they're doing super cool stuff and so hopefully might how to it takes takes you up another notch terms the super hat super cool have to the other thing I'll mention is snapshots so in Windows there's the single shadow copy and it's it was in Windows 2000 it was in Server 2003 Windows XP and Microsoft has destroyed it in Windows 10 I don't know why it was such a good feature it was amazing they've got this like files and backup things it's just it's crap it's utter crap Microsoft has screwed the pooch on Shadow Copy but the interface is still there and you can still use it on servers so for samba you could set up samba and make your ZFS snapshots map to Shadow Copy snapshots so you can create a schedule that say that snapshots your filesystem say twice a day this works exceptionally well with ZFS and you can see those snapshots in the GUI in say a Windows client in the shadow copy tab with just a little bit of configuration in your Samba now there is an example on the unread form of also configuring the recycle bin so if you delete something that goes to the recycle bin but the Windows operating system being the schizophrenic mousse on rollerblades that it is does not always honor the recycle bin so I would really strongly suggest that if you care about your files you should implement the snapshotting thing I trust ZFS snapshots I don't trust Windows as far as I could throw Steve Ballmer which is not very far what about other stuff well there are some honorable mentions here first vmware esxi vmware is the go-to I don't care what anybody says VMware is still far away ahead of everybody in the virtualization game it is great software it doesn't have underlying support for any file systems like ZFS it expects you to do all that in hardware or to have a cluster of multiple physical computers so not really an option for Steve gamers Nexus although I do like VMware VMware is a good product in it yes it's very pricey but you get what you pay for proxmox I've got to revisit proxmox proxmox is a Linux distribution but it's so much more than a Linux distribution it is actually a viable alternative to VMware the costs dramatically less it's worth the price of support it's pretty good I've used it for years I've got some boxes as a matter of fact that are pretty far out of date than I need to update and it's the story for another day proxmox is got a reasonable web GUI for managing virtual machines and it's built to do sort of the like multiple virtual machine management like consolidation it would totally handle a ZFS array and exposing that to the network and a whole bunch of docker containers and VMs it is more oriented to running a whole bunch of VMs and so it's a little bit DIY when it comes to you know adding some of the cool stuff that we saw in the unread GUI for like community plugins like media managers and plex media server and stuff like that yes you can do it but yeah there's also clone OS that's kind of flying under the radar it's clone os tech routine comm and this is a freebsd based thing but the GUI is slick as heck i have not tried this but it is freebsd and beehive but with virtual machine so it's like freenas but it's more virtual machine oriented and because it's got that yummy delicious freebsd core it has the ZFS stuff and it seems to have the ZFS stuff in the GUI so that might have been a pretty good choice I didn't get a chance to try it and it seems a little bit new so maybe not the most mature but maybe some stuff could be borrowed from that I don't know it's a possibility you could also use like so we use fedora you could also use some of the the web men there's more than just web men but you could use some of the webmin style management utilities for that but i didn't think that would be a good fit for steve's use case and yes there are a bunch of tangents and you know sort of you can go off in the weeds with a whole bunch of different options but unread and free nests are two immensely popular options and historically you know FreeNAS is a little it's a little obtuse especially for newbies like if you are even if you're very experienced with a computer like if you have a lot of experience with Windows and a little bit of experience with Linux you have certain ideas about how things are and the freeness philosophy definitely comes from people that have a lot more experience in the enterprise because things are just fundamentally done differently in the enterprise and I really appreciate that about freeness that is not something to be knocked but a lot of FreeNAS users are turned off when they encounter that because it's kind of its kind of a foreign philosophy to a lot of new freenas users I think but ZFS ZFS really is the one true file systems nothing has caught up with it yet but and now its development is accelerating again because of ZFS on Linux but FreeNAS versus on right that's what we're talking about today so with that it's pretty much set up now Steve system is a Silverstone system and it ended up being a pretty sweet little build it's got eight hotspot base built in we added an LSI disk shelf to that that's connected with eight channels of SAS six you know the scuzzy interface it's a sexy interface if you're in California SCSI but it's serial Attached scuzzy so it's sa SCSI no I'm I'm just making crap up now but the the expandability is there he has I think another C twelve plus four sixteen sixteen bays they can add drives too and if he adds them at least four at a time they can become part of the ZFS pool if not they can become part of the the pool that's the unread the unwashed under aide array that's what we'll as well we'll call that the unwashed unwrite array because unwashed masses there is one other note that I will give you which is the doctor containers don't automatically restart on startup so the user scripts thing has a really handy drop bound for restart this or run the script when the array is mounted it does but it doesn't like docker doesn't start until unwrite starts the array software and then it immediately runs that before doctor is ready I tried adding a delay to the script it didn't work so you just have to manually start those docker containers there's the docker container for DNS and and steam cache probably gonna do a docker container or another virtual machine for fog fog is a pretty cool project that allows you to boot from the network so you can do disk imaging and that sort of stuff it's really pretty awesome and for Steve setup we also added a Windows virtual machine with a pass-through graphics card to do transcoding and so of course it can mount the the file system making it can mount the ZFS array and it can see all the ZFS files and do transcoding on-the-fly so that they're not wasting space they can transcode everything to h.265 basically a lossless transcode and then they're able to more efficiently use their space so if you want to set up ZFS a nun raid which is not something I would recommend for noobs but I love ZFS and ZFS is portable to linux and freebsd so it's pretty awesome in that regard then there's a guide on the level 1 forum and I just talked you through it and Wendell this is level 1 this has been a level 1 project and thanks again for Steve to Steve at gamers Nexus for having me out so most gracious hosts check out our video because we did like you know gamers Nexus unplug it was really nice meeting Steve and all of the people behind gamers Nexus and was very awesome hopefully we can do that again sometime I'm Windell this is level 1 I'm signing out and you can probably find me in the level 1 forums see ya [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 314,018

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: aXsRIrC5bjg

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_Rogue136]

Wendel, you can auto start dockers on startup. Not sure if its from a plugin I have or not but it's just a toggle in the docker UI and it even has the ability to set a wait timer.

[u/squirrellydw]

Unraid all the way for me, been using it for 10 years with no issues and just keeps getting better.

[u/dangil]

After a hard bug in Freenas corrupted my pool, I switched to unraid for my personal use

Professionally, I still use freenas, but with certain restrictions.

[u/theobserver_]

one takes time and selective hardware, the other just throw whatever you want and away you go.

[u/jamesholden]

Tried freenas, wasn't for me. Considered unraid.

Went with Openmediavault, mergerfs and snapraid. Haven't looked back.

[u/Obzen18]

One works great. The other works great.

[u/Beedeejay]

Moved away from unraid, to snapraid and mergerfs. Two rapid succession USB drive failures meant Unraid wouldn't provide me with a third reactivation code. Screw Unraid.

[u/TrainedITMonkey]

That's the one thing I really like about this community: there is no wrong answer. I tried FreeNAS but felt way more at home with Unraid. I didn't like FreeNAS but there are others who swear by it. Anyone can try each software out and see what works best for their needs.

[u/bry2k2]

Unraid still suffers from bitrot, yes I know there are plugins to guard against it but, a) it's not perfect b) freenas/zfs needs no plugins to protect your data and zfs is a proven robust filesystem. Freenas has suffered from poor updates especially when they first launched freenas 11 and Coral (which sucked ass) there is no right answer but I would make a pro/con list to see what fits your needs best.