Question Best NAS software for beginners?

[Ironarmygeneral]

(Not sure if this is the proper topic, sorry if it's not)

So I've been using FreeNAS for a few months, and I've had nothing but issues with it. It seems like every week I'm posting something on their forum asking for help with a different issue.

Anyway, after getting passive aggressive after passive aggressive reply from their forum, and even if they CAN help me (half the time I've figured out the issue myself and spent more time arguing with them), another issue arises shortly after. After all of that, I've decided to switch to a different NAS software/OS that's not going to give me as many issues. Problem is, I'm not personally familiar with any of them, or which ones are out there.

Can someone suggest some that would be good for beginners, and possibly already work with my ZFS already in my current NAS? I've got data on that NAS that I'm trying to access and I can't even get FreeNAS to work. Would it also be possible for the existing datasets and ZFS filesystem in my NAS to work with the new OS off the bat or does it need to be backed up somehow and nuked or formatted?

 

[mdd1963]

What issues are/were you having? (Do you have a separate drive for the OS? The years old suitability/common practice to boot solely from USB flash drives is now outdated, as apparently the high writes done to the USB drives often kills most brands within a few months, rendering the system unbootable...; if determined to use USB flash drives, use high quality drives, and, utilize a mirrored pair of them to boot from)

If your system is stable, and this a home rig in a non-critical mission application, you can (like most hobbyists) ignore the 'thou shalt always use ECC RAM' addage/ mantras...

FreeNAS created storage pools are really only compatible with FreeBSD/FreeNAS/TrueNAS, to my knowledge....; I don't think they will be usable/importable within a Ubuntu/CentOS ZFS usage...

 

[USAFRet]

Full list of all the parts in this FreeNAS box, please.

And you do have a full backup of that data, correct?

 

[Ironarmygeneral]

What issues are/were you having? (Do you have a separate drive for the OS? The years old suitability/common practice to boot solely from USB flash drives is now outdated, as apparently the high writes done to the USB drives often kills most brands within a few months, rendering the system unbootable...; if determined to use USB flash drives, use high quality drives, and, utilize a mirrored pair of them to boot from)

If your system is stable, and this a home rig in a non-critical mission application, you can (like most hobbyists) ignore the 'thou shalt always use ECC RAM' addage/ mantras...

FreeNAS created storage pools are really only compatible with FreeBSD/FreeNAS/TrueNAS, to my knowledge....; I don't think they will be usable/importable within a Ubuntu/CentOS ZFS usage...

I was having instability issues, it kept having crashes, it kept giving me warnings about things that scared me, and half the time didn't work how it was supposed to even if I had it set up as I was told to. Among other minor things that just bugged me too much to deal with it.

And really I don't even want to deal with it any more. I just want to switch to something else that's easier for beginners. I made the mistake of going into it not realizing it's made more for someone who's more experienced with NAS and FreeNAS itself.

 

[Ironarmygeneral]

Full list of all the parts in this FreeNAS box, please.

And you do have a full backup of that data, correct?

It was actually built out of an old gaming rig I had. Can't remember the motherboard model but it's an AM3+ socket running an FX-4300, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, and I've got a little over 3TB of drives (a 3TB hard drive and a 120GB SSD which was all I had at the time. If I could ever get it working, I was planning on getting proper WD Red drives and upgrading to those, butttt... never was given a chance.)

And I tried doing multiple backups but the system wouldn't stay stable long enough for me to get a backup finished. So my only chance of getting the data back I assume would be to get FreeNAS up and running for a few hours, just long enough to backup the data so I can nuke the drives, correct? And then upgrade the OS?

 

[Ironarmygeneral]

What issues are/were you having? (Do you have a separate drive for the OS? The years old suitability/common practice to boot solely from USB flash drives is now outdated, as apparently the high writes done to the USB drives often kills most brands within a few months, rendering the system unbootable...; if determined to use USB flash drives, use high quality drives, and, utilize a mirrored pair of them to boot from)

If your system is stable, and this a home rig in a non-critical mission application, you can (like most hobbyists) ignore the 'thou shalt always use ECC RAM' addage/ mantras...

FreeNAS created storage pools are really only compatible with FreeBSD/FreeNAS/TrueNAS, to my knowledge....; I don't think they will be usable/importable within a Ubuntu/CentOS ZFS usage...

As for your last part, if I used something hypothetically like FreeBSD or TrueNAS, would it be possible to just import the current ZFS dataset/filesystem currently on the system with one of those?