Where are your photos? Part 2.

Well, FreeNAS has been a pain in the you know what. It has been so unstable. Constant writes to the disks tend to trigger something that causes the system to reboot. I have not quite figured out what the root cause is yet but am not about to spend any more time on this software. The problems I see with this unstability are the following.

• First, the unstability itself is the problem.
• Second, every time the machine reboots this way, one of the drives in the RAID5 configuration goes out of sync and needs to be re-synchronized with the other drives. On a 1TB storage, this takes 8 hours or so.
• Third, because of the abnormal reboot, fsck kicks in on reboot. This version of FreeNAS, based on FreeBSD 6.1, does not support the ext3 filesystem or any journal file system. I used UFS (version 1 and 2). You can imagine what happens when fsck kicks in. It's a lengthy scan through 1TB.

The lack of a journal really irks me so I am moving away from FreeNAS as fast as I built that initial interest in it. Maybe I will look at it again when they move over to FreeBSD 7.0.

It is too bad because I like the user interface (although more options can be added to it.)