OpenFiler versus FreeNAS for Mac OSX environment

I'm a photographer and I have a requirement find a better method of storing my photo library.

Currently I use a Macbook Pro and 6 external drives connected via USB2 or FW800. They are divided up in pairs, one is a copy of the other synced manually with rsync. It's slow.

I am considering building a NAS box and using two 2TB drives with software RAID to mirror the drives, and consolidating my library to one central location that I can access via 1gb lan, or Wireless network when convenient.

I would like to employ FreeNAS as I understand it supports AFP.

I don't know how software RAID works, hoping that at any time I can pull the master drive off and plug it into the macbook via eSATA so I can work with much faster speed... plug it back into the NAS box and have it sync the drives if necessary.

So, I'm seeking the best method and advise on my project. Should I consider FreeNAS or OpenFiler, and what file system should I choose for the drive so it plays nice with OSX when plugged in locally via USB, eSATA or FW800.

Many thanks

Solution 1:

I know you're looking for software raid, but I do highly recommend Adaptec SAS HBAs like the SAS-2405. Adaptec works with the FreeBSD community to support their drivers too (FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD). And you can usually pick them up at a reasonable price on eBay. Good hardware RAID will usually beat the pants off software RAID, and may add hot-swap or other features.

That said, there are several ways to mirror a drive in the software. If I remember correctly the web interface only provides one method, the most commonly used, and simplest. For wireless connections it's plenty fast enough. It will not keep up with gigabit ethernet, but may be fast enough for you regardless.

FreeNAS does support AFP; and both FreeNAS and OSX support CIFS (aka SMB) which makes them interoperable with Windows systems. You could also use iSCSI, but I wouldn't recommend doing so.

Pulling drives out of the array constantly is asking for trouble. First off, if you pull the drive and make changes then plug it back in, the array is going to assume those changes are corruptions and overwrite them. You may also introduce stability issues, but data loss from the previous problem is highly probable.

I use FreeBSD daily, so I'm biased to FreeNAS; OpenFiler would works as well though (it's based on Linux). OSX's Darwin base is also based on FreeBSD.

Solution 2:

That's not how RAID works. Think of it just as a more reliable hard disk. Don't try smarty schemes where you pull and replug drives hoping that it will resync. at least, i will resync in the wrong direction. at worst, it will declare irreconcilable inconsistency and block address to all data.

Also, RAID is no backup. what you have now is a simple backup. if anything fails while writing to the 'primary' disk, you still have the other one. In RAID1, both disks are identical, if something goes wrong in software, it will reliably write the wrong data on both disks.

it's not hard to use two disks to get something (remotely) similar to time machine: one disk has the 'master', and the other one keeps a 'yesterday' copy, with some 'views' of previous states of the data, typically going backwards a week or a month. check rsnapshot; it's a Perl, script it runs on any Unix-like system.

You can even make it the main transfer method, so you have one big disk locally connected to your mac, and use rsnapshot to keep the rolling backup on a network box. This works wonderfully even in medium-sized LANs, easily backing up the important directories of several servers and user's stations.