Building a NAS server

Hello,

I am planning to build a NAS server next week and i was wondering which OS to use.
As i see the two most common are FreeNAS and Ubuntu server + samba.

What do you think?Do you hava any experience on that?Any other idea?

Thanks!

Free NAS has a lot of eta stuff that you may find useful. What are you going to use it for?

Thanks,At the begining we are planning to use it as Fileserver.

I was looking for a little more detail. Is this for work or home? What kind of files will you be putting on the device? Are you going to be having Windows clients? Witch OS are you most skilled with?

Hi,

We are planning to use it in my job.We are planning to use it first as a file server (mean personal user files) and maybe later on we will use it as external storage of a server which saves the raw data there before process them.
Yes we are planning to have also Windows clients.
So basically we need FTP and NFS or SMB.

Ok,
I'm a Solaris admin by trade. I also work with RHEL & SLES. At my place of work we bought NetApp SANs. NetApp uses the ZFS file system just like Solaris. ZFS has build in CIFS (newer name SMB). We also have some Sun storage Tech hardware that the NetApp is replacing. On the Linux btrfs is similar to zfs.

I would not use ftp on your network use scp. There are clients that give windows scp, like winscp.

FreeNAS is ZFS setup made easier. It is similar to a Solaris file server or NetAPP setup. Though I don't know if FreeNAS can provide lungs, like the other two. If you are looking a easy setup and a nice user interfase FreeNAS might be good for you. If you are working for a big company you might want to have them buy you a professional grade appliance like Oracle storage, NetAPP or anther type of storage. Ubuntu is an easy Linux disto to do stuff with but I don't have much experience with using samba. We don't use samba at my work place and all the windows shares are on our UNIX hardware.

I hope this helps.