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Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Should I use FreeBSD?

This may seem dumb, but, my RAID 1 NAS, powered by various versions of SuSE for 10 years, recently died (autopsy & self-reflection indicate gross user error). So I'm coincidentally shopping around for a new set-up.

I need NFS, transmission-daemon, and mdadm. I've used FreeBSD in a vm and on an old laptop, so I'm slightly familiar, but not like Linux (and I love being able to access SuSE's YAST over SSH)

Why would you pick FreeBSD over SuSE for a home NAS?

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First and foremost reason, ZFS. But if you're looking for something easy to manage, FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD + ZFS) may be a better option.

FreeNas was acquired by IX Systems and as of version 8 is no longer m0n0wall based. IX Systems is actually a great company but I don't like this change. If you need to build a NAS with ZFS try out Nas4Free to keep going with the M0n0wall based FreeNAS that we all loved.

If I already have the raid 1 under mdadm, what's the path to mirrored Vdevs under zfs? I need more drives?

Remove one of the disks from the mdadm RAID1, setup a zpool on that disk, setup the OS, copy the relevant data over, and then simply attach the 2nd drive to the zpool and zfs will automatically create a mirrored vdev for you.

If the existing filesystem can be read by FreeBSD (like ext), you can just copy the data over in a single system but in the worst case, you could just copy the data over from a 2nd system over the network. You'll probably want to do that using tar with archive options, so the only difference between doing it locally vs over the network is whether you pipe the tar create directly back to tar extract, or to a tcp utility like tcputils or netcat in between.

There's no in-place migration, so you either need to copy the data somewhere else, or as the sibling comment suggests, unmirror your drives and accept the risk of having your data only on one drive while you do the copy.

Others have mentioned ZFS. I'll add that my experience is that FreeBSD changes things less often and keeps things more compatible when it does (e.g. network configuration still uses ifconfig, freebsd hasn't adopted any experimental init system and is unlikely to until one becomes proven stable) and is thus lower-maintenance.

FreeBSD has pretty decent ZFS support. That would be a good reason for a home NAS.

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