by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday December 11, 2014 @12:43PM (#48573293)
As as FreeBSD admin I would usually agree with you, especially when ZFS is involved as FreeBSD tends to be much more up to date. I have always historically just used the latest FreeBSD when I've wanted a NAS.
However, setting up a well configured NAS with FreeBSD isn't something an end user is going to do very easily. On top of that the FreeNAS devs have put a lot of effort into configuring the various services in the most optimal way. You'll probably find an off the shelf FreeBSD that you have enabled some NAS services on (SMB/NFS/whatever) will probably not perform as well as FreeNAS on the same hardware. And knowing what knobs to tweak and how takes the sort of knowledge only the devs themselves have, gained through a lot of trial and error.
Some of the things FreeNAS does out of the box, like allowing additional services to be installed and run from inside jails, would take a lot of effort to do by hand, even for a seasoned FreeBSD user.
Why (Score:2)
A serious question: why use FreeNAS, a repackaged FreeBSD, when you can just use the way more up to date real thing - FreeBSD 10.1 itself?
Re:Why (Score:2)
As as FreeBSD admin I would usually agree with you, especially when ZFS is involved as FreeBSD tends to be much more up to date. I have always historically just used the latest FreeBSD when I've wanted a NAS.
However, setting up a well configured NAS with FreeBSD isn't something an end user is going to do very easily. On top of that the FreeNAS devs have put a lot of effort into configuring the various services in the most optimal way. You'll probably find an off the shelf FreeBSD that you have enabled some NAS services on (SMB/NFS/whatever) will probably not perform as well as FreeNAS on the same hardware. And knowing what knobs to tweak and how takes the sort of knowledge only the devs themselves have, gained through a lot of trial and error.
Some of the things FreeNAS does out of the box, like allowing additional services to be installed and run from inside jails, would take a lot of effort to do by hand, even for a seasoned FreeBSD user.