FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

kdar · 2013-06-02 17:17:35

Hello everyone.

Recently I have install FreeNAS (which is based on FreeBSD) on my NAS that I have built, and I just starting using it today and found out that it can not mount ext4 (which is a filesystem of all my external drives)... transferring and backing up data over network would be very slow, of course.. so I would like to find a better solution.

Because of that.. I am trying to decide what can I possibly do.....

Should I use Ubuntu or Arch as my server instead of FreeNAS? (possibly with WebGUI admin panel like Ajenti ( http://ajenti.org/ ) to manager it all online like I can with FreeNAS...

or should I better change filesystem on my external drives (which I plan to encrypt anyways... eventually) to something that is more friendlier to FreeNAS and to FreeBSD.

What do you all use here for your NAS, servers? What filesystem do you use for your external drives? (I keep hearing that ext4 is bad, as all other ext... but I have always been using it on linux from probably very beginning).

andrewturner · 2013-06-03 12:13:59

I find that FreeBSD, using ZFS, is wonderful.
BUT: if your concern is that

transferring and backing up data over network would be very slow

then perhaps NAS is the wrong solution for you regardless.

kdar · 2013-06-06 14:25:46

well. It generally would not be a problem. But what if I want to create intermediate back ups.... Well.. I probably will not always have large data to transfer, but still.

graysky · 2013-06-06 14:36:10

Arch is fine; my NAS runs a simple base install + nfs-utils which should be all you need.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nfs

tladuke · 2013-06-06 19:55:48

What are you using that is faster than gigabit ethernet?

alphaniner · 2013-06-06 20:03:38

tladuke wrote:

What are you using that is faster than gigabit ethernet?

He's talking about external drives, so probably USB/eSATA.

kdar · 2013-06-07 23:16:25

Well, it's not even that much about how fast I can send data over the gigabit network (I am getting about 35MB/s now). It probably more about ZFS file system.... It can't be mounted in Linux yet without problems, and it also doesn't allow me to mount all my other drives that are either in ext4 or reiserfs3....

Plus from using FreeNAS for about a week, I feel that I am somewhat restrained with what I can do.

graysky wrote:

Arch is fine; my NAS runs a simple base install + nfs-utils which should be all you need.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nfs

I think I will try it as well. Did you install your Arch on USB/Jump drive? I think I will try to install it on my 8 GB USB drive and then just create encrypted partitions from my drives on NAS (I am not planning to do any RAIDs now, since I only have two drives, 3TB and 4TB...).

Should I recreate both / and /home on my USB drive? I probably will not keep much in /home except for config files... and probably 8GB will be enough for me to install nfs-utils, mkvmerge, a torrent downloader and one of the UPnP.

Last edited by kdar (2013-06-07 23:17:02)

graysky · 2013-06-07 23:32:52

It can be done, but in my case, I used an old SSD I had laying around for the system disk. Something is wrong with your Gigalan if 35 MB/s is your max... should be >90 MB/s.

Last edited by graysky (2013-06-07 23:33:45)

Arch Linux

#1 2013-06-02 17:17:35

FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#2 2013-06-03 12:13:59

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#3 2013-06-06 14:25:46

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#4 2013-06-06 14:36:10

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#5 2013-06-06 19:55:48

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#6 2013-06-06 20:03:38

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#7 2013-06-07 23:16:25

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

#8 2013-06-07 23:32:52

Re: FreeNAS, Arch and external drives with ext4?

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