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Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 4:53 pm
by Redwolf
Does anyone have any experience in this? If I switch to accessing files on my 1gbps ethernet will that be much slower than SATA. I'm not sure. FreeNAS looks really cool and I could make my old AMD computer a file server.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 12:37 am
by tangles
I moved my OS over to FreeNAS (while using the same hardware) to test if the slowness currently experienced on macOS (v 1.7.n) was not intrinsic to the drives, nor their setup/initialisation.

This was using 8 mirrored 4TB SATA Seagate Barracudas ST4000DM004 which flew! So no issue with moving between platforms. (assuming you don't push zpool updates)

I've since moved back to macOS because I have absorbed the slowness to a degree with installing 10GB switches and wish to show support to the macOS devs as much as possible too.

Having said that, I've also installed NAS4Free onto a spare rig and am testing SyncThing to backup onto 3 x 12TB IronWolfs in RAIDz for another backup at the folks house.
I noticed a few issues with FreeNAS's addons/services that didn't want to install for me, which is why I stuck with the original developer who's now developing NAS4Free.

I did notice that FreeNAS created a new dataset on my existing pool called $poolname/.system, so I simply deleted that once my testing was done.

Whatever you do, insure that the pool you create under any non macOS platform has the attributes of normalization=formD & casesensitivity=insensitive, so that you look after macOS's semantics, or just move your disks over like I did. (NAS4Free has a "syncronise command that syncs the disks to the web GUI for you… neat!)

Cheers,

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 6:48 am
by Redwolf
Interesting that you recommend Nas4Free over FreeNas. Everything I read recommended FreeNAS over Nas4Free.

Could you explain what you mean by sync and why you prefer NAS4Free?

As for my pool, it's degraded. It's a 4 drive pool of 3TB drives. Instead of buying another 3 TB drive, I elected to buy four 6 TB drives. I'm hoping I can get it setup and move the data over before the pool eats itself.

Yes, I'm already updating my backups of the more crucial data. :p

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:06 pm
by lundman
What 10g equipment did you go with? Recently got 10g fiber to home, and slowly changing the LAN to 10g. Started with a netgear xs505 while I look around so at least the NAS can talk 10G to the internet.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 7:29 pm
by tangles
I used to use 2 x Netgear GS716T smart switches for my core/backbone as I used 2 runs of fibre to trunk their SFP ports.

I now have installed 2 x Asus XGU2008 dumb switches (all copper) because the price was too good to ignore given they have 2 x 10GB ports and 8 x 1GB ports.
I have Chelseo 10GB HBAs (both copper and SFP) and also an Atto TB2 <—> 2x10GB copper box for end machines.
NetPerf aside, the best realworld I/O transfer I’ve achieved using SMB (macOS <—> macOS) is 932MB/sec of large contiguous files.

I’m very happy.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 2:44 pm
by tangles
nas4free has this feature to synchronise whatever storage/zpool setup youve created elsewhere so that NAS4free’s gui “syncs” and shows the setup in the web gui so u can start using/sharing it.

FreeNAS probably has it too, but I encountered service issues (broken and not installing) before I even intoduced my pools to the environment.

I should try again one day soon I guess and see if it was me being a noob.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:59 am
by Dismayed
I'm giving up on OSX completely. My computer, a mid-2010 Mac Pro, still runs well, but I can't upgrade beyond Sierra. That would be fine, except for the fact that vendors such as Intuit (TurboTax) no longer install on any OS prior to High Sierra. So I'm moving my ZFS pool to a FreeNAS appliance, and I'll convert my Mac Pro to Windows 10. Odd that Microsoft offers better support for legacy Mac hardware than does Apple.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 9:18 am
by JasonBelec
Amusing posts.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Mon Sep 07, 2020 1:29 pm
by atonaldenim
Dismayed wrote:I'm giving up on OSX completely. My computer, a mid-2010 Mac Pro, still runs well, but I can't upgrade beyond Sierra. That would be fine, except for the fact that vendors such as Intuit (TurboTax) no longer install on any OS prior to High Sierra. So I'm moving my ZFS pool to a FreeNAS appliance, and I'll convert my Mac Pro to Windows 10. Odd that Microsoft offers better support for legacy Mac hardware than does Apple.


2010 Mac Pro is Apple-supported up through Mojave (with a new GPU) or High Sierra (with an older GPU), I'm running both OSes on my 2009 and 2010 Mac Pros! Happy to help you figure out that upgrade if you like. The Mac Pro forum on MacRumors has tons of useful info.

Re: Thinking of switching from Mac ZFS to FreeNAS

PostPosted: Sun Jan 31, 2021 2:34 pm
by Dismayed
I was able to install High Sierra, but that OS is now too old to run programs that I need, such as Turbo Tax. So I've installed Win 10 on a new SSD and reformatted the old OSX SSD as a dat drive.