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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

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Wait, ZFS requires maintenance?

I’ve been running freenas for years and have deployed/ran ZFS solutions as part of my job for a decade- this is the first I’m learning about that, it’s usually set and forget.

Am I just a bad admin?

Somewhat depends. Scrubbing is about detecting bit rot. You need to make sure that all of your data is periodically accessed so that zfs can check for errors. You can accomplish this either by having a workload which touches all of your data on a regular basis or by scrubbing. Depends on your setup.

Scrubbing is still preferable though, as normal reads won't cause every copy of the metadata to be read. Likewise, on a mirrored pair of disks, a given block of file content will only be read from one disk. (That is, since the file content is verified using checksums contained in the metadata, we don't need to read the file data back from both disks, so they can be used to service read requests independently of one another.)

All good points, especially about mirrors.

I added `zpool scrub tank` to cron once a week.

Same here, I ran FreeNAS for 3+ years ZFS and all that. After having a drive die, replacing the wrong drive, trying to recover and loosing all the data (I had a 2month old drive in a Bank safe so was able to recover) but after that I switch to Synology that provides a nice blinking light for the failed drive, auto updating OS, surveillance, plex, etc I never looked back. Since then I've bought at least 10 more for work and family. Sure a drive dies every few years but w/ RAID6 and Amazon a swap is 2 days away click repair move on. Coupled w/ B2 cloud backup I never worry about data loss anymore. Synology is an appliance, FreeNAS was a pet, at this point in my life I don't have time for Pets.

> ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

According to FreeBSD's handbook[0], you only need to scrub the drives once a month, and check `zpool status` regularly.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html

My crontab:

  # scrub
  0       1       1,15    *       *       zpool scrub zroot
  0       8       5,20    *       *       send_admin_email "zpool status" "$(zpool status)"

FreeNAS does this as a scheduled job though.

I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/

I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.

I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.

Why is that?

I overanalyze everything.

Hah! I have been there. In the end I took the plunge and bought a DS218+.

- 2 bays so that I can run one big HD for storage and an SSD for software (backups in the cloud and on external drives)

- Intel CPU for best compatibility with software packages from third party sources and docker

- decent video playback support

I have had it for 1.5 years and haven't looked back. I don't run much on it other than Plex, torrents, syncthing and time machine backups. But it is so much better than my old laptop that I was using for all this before.

I just went for the gold and bought the 8 Bay system. We run out Plex server on it, backups, file server etc. Still have 2 bays unused.

I understand your experience. It was only after time spent comparing models that I found that a slightly easier way (which may not work for you or anyone else) is to figure out three things:

- start with the number of drive bays you’d like to have (Synology has a good calculator page you can use to figure out different configurations, if you wish to go that deep).

- the model year you’d prefer (newer, older, etc.). This is part of the model (like DSx17 is from 2017, DSy18 is from 2018).

- and if you prefer an Intel CPU or a non-x86/ARM CPU (this decides what kind of additional software you can find or run easily).

This is still a lot of work, but breaking it down helps.

I did the exact same thing. A year on FreeNAS which did “work” but required so much fiddling that I bought a Synology and have never looked back.

After some years of FreeNAS at home and in the company I've decided to go with Unraid for my home storage, it's just easier to add and change drives and the UI is more focused on storage too. Adding how easy it is to use e.g. NextCloud with Unraid I'm much happier than with FreeNAS.

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