While we were looking for a network storage solution for our organization we found quite a few open-source and proprietary options available. One of the more interesting open-source solutions was FreeNAS. FreeNAS is very well featured, quite well developed and completely free.
Below is a partial feature list for FreeNAS:
- Built upon FreeBSD 6
- Configured and managed through a web interface
- Multiple network connectivity / protocol standards
- RAID 0 / 1 / 5
- SATA / USB / Firewire Drives Supported
- Runs well on low spec. hardware
Below is an excerpt from one of the reviews that we read:
FreeNAS (version 0.66 beta at the time of writing) is an open source network-attached storage solution, which in many ways equals or even exceeds the capabilities of many commercially developed and manufactured products. FreeNAS on an old 400 Mhz Intel Pentium based personal computer with a cheap 100BASE-T Ethernet card and two old IDE hard disks in a RAID 1 mirror configuration equaled the performance of 99% of the commercial NAS products I work with on a daily basis as part of my day job.
This is simply astounding when you consider that FreeNAS is a fledgling open source project. Testing I did in my lab with FreeNAS on a high end Xeon with SATA disks simply screamed. There’s just no other way to describe it. I ran my throughput tests five times before I was sure I hadn’t made some fundamental mistake with the math. I saw $75k performance from a $5k box running a beta NAS software platform.
You can read the full review at The Storage Forum >> FreeNAS: short review. It goes into a lot of depth about the product and comes out with a very favorable review.
Another good review (you need to register to read it) is at TechRepublic >> FreeNAS: Network Attached Storage for the rest of us.