What NAS software?

[Maverick]

I currently have a home built NAS running FreeNAS 9.1 on an HP Microserver with 2x4TB drives and 4Gb Ram. I'm running short of storage so have ordered 2x4TB additional drives. I'm stuck on V 9.1 of FreeNas due to hardware limitations. I'm considering taking the opportunity to reconfigure the NAS which is used for music, films, photo storage and backups of the other boxes in the house. Should I ditch FreeNAS (which has worked flawlessly for the past >5years) to something else which is, and can be kept, up to date? If so what is worth looking at? I would prefer something that will run from a memory stick (as FreeNAS does), needs to support afp (for Timemachine backups of iMac/Macbooks) as well as samba (for backup storage for Linux boxes). With the new drives there will be a total of 16TB of drives - what is the best way to configure them?
TIA

[Afasoas]

You could look at Xpenology (which is essentially Opensourced Synology software) or Open Media Vault.

Have you had any thoughts on how you would move your data around if you switch away from ZFS?

[Maverick]

I have had a look at open media vault, seems to have what I need although I haven't explored the possibility of running it on a usb drive. Xpenology looks a bit fiddly. The original appeal of FreeNAS was that it 'just worked'. It's always had all the bits I need 'out of the box' so I've not needed to add any extras. Media is streamed to the TV via a (now pretty ancient) Apple TV.
I have a large (5TB I think) external drive I can transfer the current contents of to if I'm rebuilding - just the films and music, the photos and other stuff are backed up elsewhere.
I was really wondering whether there was any real downside to continuing to run the old and not being maintained version of FreeNAS and if there was anything better out there. The current installation has run the ZFS filesystem with 4GB ram ok - will adding another 8TB of disks have a negative impact? The minimum spec says 8GB ram for ZFS which is not possible on the microserver.

[Afasoas]

Which Microserver is it? N40L or similar?
ZFS uses the memory for caching. I strongly suspect you'll be okay running later versions of FreeNAS with 4GB RAM, albeit with a performance penalty.

I've notice Microsoft like to upgrade the SMB protocol used for file sharing. Thus, the ability to upgrade is important to ensure compatibility with future versions of Windows 10.
There HP Gen8 Microserver is available from time-to-time with a useful cashback offer, making it very affordable. A replacement might be worth considering.

[Maverick]

Yes a N40L from around 2011 - can't remember exactly when I purchased it. I'm not inclined to ditch the perfectly ok existing server. I am about to ditch a perfectly functioning HP GL110 5th Gen (I think) and that bothers me. I've got the same functionality(email web & DNS server) running on a Raspi 3 with significantly lower energy cost using a 60Gb WD-pi-drive.

The way forward would seem to be to install the new disks as ZFS and see. It is running in what is essentially a single user enviroment so performance isn't really an issue. I guess if it is running ZFS adequately on the 9.1 release it is ok to risk an upgrade. Rollback is easily managed as FreeNAS keeps a copy of the pre-upgrade version on the OS media. Think I may have a plan - thanks for your thoughts.

[Afasoas]

http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Memory
It looks like you can upgrade the memory - I do believe I've read somewhere that >4GB isn't officially supported by HP but it should work.

I'm not a fan of ditching perfectly good kit, and ZFS does like it's ARC cache. I'm funning ZFS under Linux on a 16GB server and when the cache is warm, it's often using 11GB of the available RAM. 4GB is allocated to virtual machines (Firewall and media server) with the remaining 1 GB used by the DNS, DHCP, Samba and the OS itself.

If you were running some flavour of Linux with MDADM (software RAID), NFS and Samba you should be good with just 1-2 GB RAM.

I'd rather be running email/DNS servers on the HP rather than a Pi, particularly if your whole network is relying on that DNS service.

Good luck.

[freeflow]

What's wrong with Nas4Free?  This is the continuation of FreeNas and still supports older hardware quite well.n