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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why anyone would do this instead of running FreeNAS. It comes with everything you need including ZFS pools.

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I'm quite comfortable with my NAS running debian and using btrfs-based RAID to manage the disks. Setting it up has been quite straightforward and it's been running for the last 8 years without breaking a sweat. For SOHO applications is more than enough.

Because you can't easily change the size of the disks one at a time. How would you migrate from 4 x 4TB to 4 x 6TB disks by buying one disk at a time?

You replace each disk in turn, then grow the pool, right? You don't get the increased capacity until you're done, but still workable.

Workable, but not the point.

This is why I picked Synology as my nas. The Synology Hybrid Raid system let me just shove all my extra drives in the 4 bay NAS and still have parity protection.

Then I just slowly upgraded all drives to the current money/capacity optimum one or two at a time.

If I was made of money and could afford to upgrade all the drives in a pool in one go, I'd definitely go for ZFS too.

You don’t need to upgrade at once. You can upgrade gradually with the right config.

You gradually replace one disk at a time, resilver then repeat. ZFS automates most or all the work mentioned in this article and it comes with built-in bitrot detection.

Btw I have run a NAS similar to this machine for 6 years now using FreeNAS. It’s awesome.

So if I have 4x4TB drives and switch a drive so it's now 3x4TB + 1x6TB, and do the resilver, will the ZFS capacity be increased by 2TB?

No not until you have replaced them all.

In that case, I don't understand why you replied to my comment asking "How would you migrate from 4 x 4TB to 4 x 6TB disks by buying one disk at a time?". In case it wasn't clear, the buying one disk at a time aspect is important, because storage needs increase steadily over time, not all at once, so it makes financial sense to buy a higher capacity drive and replace a lower capacity one over a longer period of time, instead of replacing all drives at once and then have most of the extra storage sit there unused.

FreeNAS is great but last time I checked it didn't support the Opteron based microservers from HP. I don't know if this has changed in the past few years but it's why I went Linux on mine.

According to

https://www.servethehome.com/hpe-proliant-microserver-gen10-...

the 10+ seems to run freenas fine.

Better range of hardware support in Linux than FreeBSD.

Also note that the FreeBSD implementation of ZFS has been replaced and ported from OpenZFS (formerly ZFSonLinux).

On paper. In practice FreeBSD has support for the great hardware you should be using anyway. The sketchy stuff, and the oddball only one person even has it in their personal museum Linux has better support for. (Also the latest and greatest linux will generally get support for first, but if it is worth using FreeBSD will get support)

I have plenty of experience with Ubuntu and wanted to reuse that. Learning FreeNAS just for this one machine I am building seems like an overkill.

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