just for Sean ONeil

[Sean Oneil]

Bob,

FreeNAS is not an application you run on your Mac. It is an operating system specifically designed to turn a computer into a storage appliance. Instead of using a Macintosh computer to serve the storage, you instead use a server-grade PC with SATA disks attached and FreeNAS running as the system disk. But rather than using a hard drive as the system disk, FreeNAS is so small you can install it on a USB thumb drive. FreeNAS could run on an Intel Mac using Boot Camp, but that would of course defeat the purpose.

Once the FreeNAS server is set up, you connect to it using AFP on your Macintosh workstation. Just like you would connect to another Mac.

Yes, FreeNAS was the reason AFP performance was weak. However, just today I tried the latest alpha version and AFP performance was pretty good. AJA System Test showed 70MB/s write, 100MB/s read. Before it was something like 20MB/s. But since it’s an alpha I’m not about to deploy it. Something to try again in the future.

Sean

[Bob Zelin]

From my ignorance of this product,and VMWare, I guess I just find it hard to believe (and incredible) that a 32Meg program runs the server, the display, the disk drive host card, and manages the distribution of the storage to multiple clients. If this is a stand alone operating system, how does it know how to run the native host controller on the server PC. Do you assign the clients and their IP’s
in Freenas ?

Bob Zelin

[Sean Oneil]

It’s a stripped-down version of FreeBSD (which is what OSX is loosely based on). There is no graphic desktop environment. That’s why it’s so small. No icons, no wallpaper, no web browser, no apps whatsoever. The machine itself gives you a simple text menu to set the IP addresses and such. Then you connect to it over the network and there is a web-based graphic interface to control it all. Here’s a screenshot of the Web interface:
https://www.dailycupoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/freenas13.png

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

There’s a lot of options. Not sure what I’m going to do. Using a G5 does look more promising than in the recent past. I see all the new SATA cards support port multipliers, which is interesting. And I just found is that ZFS is unofficially available on the current Leopard. Apple provides the source code and there is a community that builds installers for it.
https://zfs.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

Then there’s the whole Time Machine thing. I’m thinking of turning a FreeNAS server into a giant Time Machine disk for backing up media. Lots to think about.

Sean