My Experience with a Nas/raid5 Built

I wanted to build a RAID/NAS box in a WINDOWS/LINUX environment, getting the best perfomance I can with minimum spending. I thought initially that FreeNAS would fill the bill but then I noticed the relatively slow samba on BSD (maybe around 6MB/s over a 100MB) with a PIII-700/256MB RAM. I thought I can do better than that. I got a cheap ebay lsi megaraid i4 511 card and with nas2 I got actually 4MB/s. To top the decrement in performance, if the card actually dies I have to get a second similar one to recover the data - not really good perspective. Also unique NIC support when I actually wanted 2 NICS on 2 different subnets .

Comparing FreeNAS and NASlite2 I do believe that FreeNAS is superior from various point of view such as WEB interface, software raid, SMART drive control/reporting (not sure about UPS support), multiple NIC support, better security. NAS has probably going some performance boost out of very low end computers which is not bad actually but is rather limited otherwise. For example on my machine NAS2 would lock up and would not be able to do any administration without a reboot induced by power button. I also had a little trouble in the beginning with FreeNAS when I installed.

I am not familiar with BSD though so I kept trying with a Linux based solution. I eventually decided I am going to use the good ol’ Slackware and do the right thing i.e. a full install. I ended up with a full install of Slack 12 on software raid 5 out of generic ide cards. I am getting about 17MB/s over 1Gbs card from a RAID5 over 4 PATA 320GB WDC with xfs filesystem. I have now UPS shutown (apcupsd), smart spindown (ngflushd), 2 NICs, custom samba, ssh, and normal linux distro to support other crazy things I may want out of this machine that I got for the rather high price of 70$.

Again I believe the capability of my setup is equivalent to the FreeNAS but superior to NAS. I can actually appreciate more the FreeNAS solution that beats my current setup in term of interface.

I read some concerns about long term stability and associated risk of data loss but I can not comment as I had no trouble in the week I had Freenas up. Naslite was also good and stable for about 2 weeks I had it up but the hardware raid is inferior to the software raid and the single NIC was a real turn off for me. I trust Slackware as I know it and been using it for ~10 years now so I would be surprised if I will be getting