As long as it doesn’t change your pool somehow so you can no longer use it on your old system.
To answer main quiestion. Other free NAS solutions which support ZFS are Nas4Free (mentioned), ZFSguru (very austeric GUI) and NappIt - nas gui for Solaris/OpenIndiana. The last one is most interesting as ZFS was born on Solaris so it is native environment to it.
Also you may want to try Rockstor (mentioned), Xpenology (mentioned), Openfiler, Nexenta (Community Edition), Amahi (Community Edition), unraid (paid but quite cheap) and offcourse most famoust one - OpenMediaVault which has ZFS and BTRFS plugins.
I plan to run ZFS on linux without ECC… Im a rebel.
Can you post it on FreeNAS forum? Just wait a minute, ill make some popcorn first, and get a relaxing position on my armchair … ;D
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I also will be getting an optane ssd to use as a L2ARC
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Openfiler is “discontinued”.
There was some talk of being able to use a fast SSD for dedup. Not sure if that’s been implemented yet though.
intel supposed already released a driver/program to use optane as system memory on linux…
Your machine will literally explode in a ball of fire big enough to engulf a small town…
…but worse than that all BSD loving kittens have just been put to the knife.
How do you feel now - Cat Murderer?
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I think I’ll have chinese for lunch now.
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That’s true, although only RHEL and SLES are on the supported OS list (no BSD). No UEFI support either.
I think the benefit of having ZFS isolate the dedup on an nvme or optane is so it doesn’t interfere with ARC and other RAM operations. But like I said, I’m not sure if it’s implemented yet. Allan Jude discussed it briefly in Wendell’s interview with him.
Thats part of why I plan to do ZFS on linux.
It would be interesting to see the performance difference between using the Optane as RAM through the Intel driver or using it as L2ARC through ZFS.
ubuntu + zfs + samba = same deal.
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Could even skip the Intel driver that makes it like system ram and reverse it
… just alter it to use the optane as arc… And ram as l2arc
Does the L2arc SSD have to be a specific type or any old ssd; and will it only function with ZFS or is it a property of FreeNAS?
Is it possible to run multiple instances of Transmission on FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server?
Anyone know a good tutorial series on youtube to set up FreeNAS?
Any modern SSD will work. It is a feature of ZFS and not exclusive to FreeNAS.
Sure. FreeNAS is based off of BSD, so your easiest way to get that running would be to set up different jails with transmission having access to the shared storage pool.
If you’re on ubuntu server, IDK, just run a bunch of snaps?
Their youtube channel. Also, L1 did a video on it, under the L1 linux channel.
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I’ve kind of liked FreeNAS because their domain integration works pretty well for a non-Windows machine. Been using it in a domain environment for about 3 years now after moving from Xpenology (which had a cool UI but was buggy to upgrade because of lack of real support).
I’ve finally done enough Samba configs manually that I am able to get *Nix machines on my network without too many hassles and I’m starting to migrate to reg. FreeBSD just because I barely do anything besides serve files with my ZFS VMs and they don’t need any extra bloat.
I was using CentOS 7 before but the Samba packages actually had major regression issues, with the same config literally was 100x slower than the same config on FreeBSD. Was hard to believe that RedHat would let such a glaring issue stay out there for so long, but CentOS really is a bastard stepchild who gets no attention from its family. They appear to pour all their resources in new advances in KVM and the like, which I appreciate, just needed a different animal for the good ol’ serving files.
I guess I could have compiled Samba from scratch and likely had a better outcome on CentOS, but that would have been more of a hassle in the long run than just switching OS. I’m happy I moved to FreeBSD. It’s a lot easier to make RC scripts than systemd unit files, so as long as Samba is working well in my domain and the ZFS is mature and doesn’t have any surprises, I’m a happy camper. Plus rsync, NFS and iscsi don’t hurt, either.
I recommend FreeBSD to anyone who wants to move to something more meat-and-potatoes and isn’t offput by using a terminal. There’s Webmin if you do need some GUI some of the time, which has a ZFS-aware plugin now and can help with some of the Samba (although, I found it hurt for the base config but could help with things like user creation/management - be warned!). If you need an easy guide for doing Samba on *Nix machines I followed this how-to which works very well: https://blog.iandreev.com/?p=2676#comment-212
There’s some slight updates for Samba48 I have in this scratch-post site I maintain (remember, Samba is the same on Linux and FreeBSD): http://vlog.averyfreeman.com/doku.php/winbind_offline_logon
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This may be a necro, but its such a quality post. 
I apologize for reviving the necrothread. Google makes things like NAS choices, Samba, FreeNAS, etc. continually relevent, though! One of the most useful posts I ever read involving Samba was a wiki for Ubuntu 10.04 describing /etc/pam.d/common-auth and common-account modifications - still relevant in 2018…!
Back to the original question, though, I think FreeNAS is a great choice for anyone wanting a high-quality NAS with a good web UI, though. They had the blip with Corral (v10), but I think the’re on the right track these days. Having used both for extended periods, I would definitely recommend it over Xpenology (or really any other web-UI NAS OS I’ve tried).
Just remember to have a way to guard against disaster because nothing but another ZFS box can read ZFS pools.
I always use VMs because you can always just spin up another VM if the first one dies (not that this has ever happened to me - yet). Have a spare USB drive installation ready if you’re on it bare metal, etc.
I have had issues importing ZFS-on-Linux pools to FreeBSD, but not vice-versa. Twice now. I think it’s because when I build pools in Linux I’ve used /dev/disk/by-id/ to which there is no parallel in FreeBSD - in FreeBSD pools are always built with /dev/da0 /dev/da1 etc which is analagous to /dev/sda /dev/sdb in Linux. I think if you build them that way in Linux they may import to FreeBSD without issue, but I have not personally tried it.
Stuff to keep in mind…