Comments by "Dmitry Kazakov" (@dmitrykazakov2829) on "Lawrence Systems" channel.

Thanks for this overview. I am a long time user of FreeNAS. Unfortunately my experience was rather disappointing. I had lots of problems with it: - Booting time. FreeNAS boot is incredibly slow. It takes more than 10 minutes to boot a i5 650 16G RAM machine. - Network interface freeze. Under heavy load the network interface collapses. I have Intel X540-T1 which is a decent old 10G card. The OS tells me that everything is OK but ping works no more even after restarting the network. Only full reboot helps. It is noticeable that the system log shows no issues. - Sometimes the whole system crashes under network load, of course, there is no traces in the system log either. An unstable system is the least you wanted from a NAS. - The performance of SMB shares is abysmal. Browsing the network with a FreeNAS share in it from the Windows side takes literally hours (the green band of death). Sometimes the Windows file explorer gets frozen. You might argue that it is not a FreeNAS fault, but FreeNAS contributes a lot to the Microsoft problems. - Data transfer rates are pitiful while the CPU and disk loads are always very low. I could never reach even 1Gbaud. - NFS works OK, but FreeNAS has only version 3. The version 3 has no UTF-8 support which renders it unusable to me. Otherwise my advise to unhappy FreeNAS users: try NFS it is many times faster than SMB. Each new FreeNAS upgrade made things worse. I progressed up to 11.3 U2. I did fresh install. Nothing helped. The system became unusable rebooting each time I attempted remote backup via SMB share. My guess is that there are severe issues in the FreeBSD kernel, but I have no time or desire to investigate the mess. Next I tried to upgrade to TrueNAS Nightly build. That killed my SMB shares, and I finally had enough. Especially because an alternative presented itself in the form of Ubuntu 20 LTS. I am not a fan of Ubuntu, but 20 has ZFS out of the box. So I gave it a try. My ZFS pool was imported without any issues. Though you should beware that disks are referenced by device names by default. If some are USB disks be prepared to nasty surprises! So I had to re-import by disk IDs. Setting up mail notifications relay is a huge headache in Linux. Mail works out of the box in FreeNAS. That was the only real issue to me. The rest took one hour to configure. The result was more than impressive. The system boots under one minute. Windows explorer works with the shares again. No more crashes. There is no limitations of what I can run there. It is just a normal Linux machine. I can start my house automation system there without messing with dockers, jails anything. I am finally done with custom NAS and OpenBSD.
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