Does anyone have experience with both, and could share the differences. I’m putting together a NAS, and I’m considering either FreeNAS or Ubuntu server. I know Ubuntu much better than FreeBSD and likely there are more applications available, but I want to make sure I won’t be missing alot of NAS functionality in FreeNAS.
Thanks,
Webmin is tailored less towards NAS administration and more towards general server-y things, such as DNS, Apache, and SQL database type stuff. FreeNAS's web admin interface is set up out of the box to make ZFS really easy to deal with, and it will let you set up automatic snapshots, scrubbing, and a whole host of other complex ZFS features with minimal headache. If you want to do this with Webmin, you need to know your way around the command line quite a bit. For a NAS, if you want ZFS, use FreeNAS. If you don't know what ZFS is, Wendell did an excellent video on it a while back, but basically it's very stable and protects against disasters better than other filesystems. If you have a specific reason for not wanting ZFS, maybe Ubuntu Server is better, but I'd still lean towards a NAS distro like Open Media Vault even if you don't want FreeNAS+ZFS. Since a NAS has such a unique workload compared to a "normal" server, you'll have a harder time configuring it without a distribution tailored for NAS use. Can it be done? Yes. Would I recommend it? No.
So the the FS plugins(?) for BTRFS is not as complete or not meant for the same sort of thing? I assume SAMBA and NFS shares are easy enough on both.
Btrfs for raid 1 is production stable, I'm not sure about their raid5/6/z implementation. It's worth looking in to as I really like a lot of the features in btrfs over zfs.
You can use zfs on Linux too, if it's not supported on Ubuntu server now it will be on version 16.
I personally use Ubuntu server. If you just need a nas and want to use zfs then freenas is great but if you want to do other things too it's so much easier with a full Linux os.
An alternative is open media vault, not sure if it supports zfs or btrfs but it runs on top of a standard debian install and can be installed on top of an existing debian system. Which means you can use it just like a regular debian install as well as having the webui and everything.
If you're using your nas for static storage (media library, backups, etc.) then you might want to have a look at snapraid. It's sort of a hybrid of disk redundancy and backup which has a lot of flexibility over raid, zfs and btrfs. But you can't use it for file systems which have frequent changes (not just writes and reads but file modification).
This is what I meant.
I can also personally vouch for OMV, it is an excellent light alternative to FreeNAS. It provides the benefit of an easy web UI without the crazy overhead of a fancy filesystem like ZFS.
Haha, I kinda skimmed your post a little, missed that bit :p
How about unraid? LTT seems to advocate it, being able to create BRTFS raid 0/1/5/6 (is that considered a raid array, or Logical Volume?) I could VM inside unraid if I wanted other services, which isn't ideal, but I'm considering my options.