I have a HP Gen8 Microserver running as a NAS using OpenBSD. It has been serving well for like 5 months. I choose OpenBSD over FreeBSD because:
1. FreeBSD was my first consideration because of ZFS, but as far as I know, ZFS doesn’t work well with RAID controller, and neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD has a driver for the B120i array controller on the mainboard (HP is to be blamed). I could use AHCI mode instead RAID which also suits ZFS of FreeBSD, yet there is a notorious fan noise issue of that approach. 2. A HP P222 array controller works right out of the box on OpenBSD, maybe FreeBSD as well but the combination of ZFS and RAID controller seems weird to me. 3. OpenBSD is actually out of my expectation. CIFS and NFS is just easy to setup. The most fabulous thing to me is the full disk encryption. I had a disk failure and the array controller was burnt once because I had some cooling issue. However, I was confident to get a replacement and no data was lost. As the 5TB limitation, I haven’t been there. > On Nov 14, 2019, at 10:26 PM, Jan Betlach <jbetl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi guys, > > I am setting up a home NAS for five users. Total amount of data stored on NAS > will not exceed 5 TB. > Clients are Macs and OpenBSD machines, so that SSHFS works fine from both (no > need for NFS or Samba). > I am much more familiar and comfortable with OpenBSD than with FreeBSD. > My dilema while stating the above is as follows: > > Will the OpenBSD’s UFS stable and reliable enough for intended purpose? NAS > will consist of just one encrypted drive, regularly backed to hardware RAID > encrypted two-disks drive via rsync. > > Should I byte the bullet and build the NAS on FreeBSD taking advantage of > ZFS, snapshots, replications, etc? Or is this an overkill? > > BTW my most important data is also backed off-site. > > Thank you in advance for your comments. > > Jan >
