FreeNAS 0.7: powerful and not dead

“Recently, the FreeNAS developers have released version 0.7 of
their FreeBSD-based operating system for network-attached storage
(NAS). This is a major release, which introduces support for the
ZFS file system among other things. Around the same time, fears
were expressed about the future of FreeNAS as a BSD-based NAS but,
in the end, a solution has been found.

“FreeNAS 0.7 is based on FreeBSD 7.2 and includes a lot of file
sharing protocols. This way it can talk to all major operating
systems: GNU/Linux, the BSDs, Windows, and Mac OS X. FreeNAS also
supports several types of media streaming protocols and can act
like an iTunes server. In addition, it supports iSCSI and different
levels of software RAID. All of this can be managed from the web
interface so users don’t have to know the FreeBSD commands under
the hood.

“One of the advantages of FreeNAS is that it has very low system
requirements, as it needs only 128 MB of RAM. This makes it
attractive to blow the dust off an old Pentium 2 or 3 PC, put a
couple of hard drives in it and make it a NAS. Of course, for high
performance the machine still needs enough RAM and CPU horsepower.
All of this makes FreeNAS a popular operating system for central
storage and media streaming at home.”

Complete Story