I wrote a blog post about my inability to choose a NAS OS and how Rockstor looks most likely for me to use

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Hello all!

I wrote up a blog post on my site about my difficulty picking a NAS solution and mention Rockstor, why not take a look?

http://www.rossfisher.me/2015/12/nas-platform-confusion-or-which-nas-os-do-i-pick/

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You, me, and probably a hundred other people are having those same struggles right now. I’ve been dragging my feet for almost two months, testing various NAS OS options, but I haven’t committed to one because they all have SOME kind of drawback for my application.

Rockstor continues to look like the leader, although I’m bummed that there isn’t a good drive spin-down feature, drive monitoring page, more Rock-Ons, etc. I’m thinking I will grab a stable subscription soon and just go along for the ride. Rockstor has only gotten better and better since I found it, and I expect in a year’s time all of my concerns will have been patched/updated away.

This product isn’t “there” yet, but it will be soon and when it gets “there” it is going to blow everyone else out of the water. Plus, Suman seems like a great guy. He also seems like he’s stretched a little thin and could use a few more staffers, but more stable subscriptions will get us that as well!

Post back here when you make a decision about what to do because it may help me as well. Good luck!

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Nice post @zorrobyte! I just left a short comment there. I appreciate your patience as we are working with cutting edge stuff here, everything from btrfs to docker to our own stack. But looking back at this year, we’ve developed so much and the stability improved substantially. I don’t know if 2016 is going to be the year of Linux desktop, but sure hope it will be the year of Rockstor :smile:

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Thanks for your kind comment @Learning2NAS. Rockstor has pretty much consumed last 3 years of my life, so it makes me happy to read these comments. You are right about us being stretched thin. Subscriptions will certainly help! So will testing, bug reports and pull requests – it’s all about that bass community!

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LOL @suman.

I’ll do my part :smile:

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I’ve been in the same boat as you for over a year. I’ve tried/talked myself into freenas on three separate occasions and every time I’ve gone back to a Linux flavor for one reason or another.

Things i love about RockStor over freenas

  1. CentOS based - I’m a linux fan boy and while i can function in freebsd it doesn’t feel natural to me.
  2. BTRFS - I started using btrfs from the CLI on Ubuntu server 14.10 for my NAS/Plex server and find the CLI commands mostly intuitive and functional, ie adding disk to a pool and balancing the data. I was slightly living on the edge with unstable raid5/6 on the 3.xx kernels.
  3. Solid WebUI - While i’ll admit that the freenas UI feels better, RockStor has done a good job so far with their implementation. My only real gripe is that it will hang my browser after running un attended for a while, both chrome and firefox.
  4. DOCKER! aka, RockOns backend. I’ll take this hands down over freenas jails. No matter how the team implements the WebUI portion there is nothing stopping you from making/running docker from the CLI. Which opens you up to the whole world of Docker Hub images.

One last thing that i haven’t had time to investigate is i don’t think the fstab is being generated correctly. ie it’s using /dev/sdX instead of UUID and was causing boot problems. If i manually partition and format the disk using ext4 the fstab was correctly using UUID. Again i really didn’t look to much into the cause but when i was poking around about a month back i seem to remember that was the issue. i might grab a spare disk and do an install just to poke around.

Thank you so very much RockStor team and the best of luck to you in 2016.