Volume management
Will they work with your disk drives?
Files stored in a central location and easily accessible by multiple machines is the primary function of a NAS. Because most of the distributions in our list take over an entire installation disk, it’s best if you start with at least a two-disk NAS setup. While it’s possible to carve your existing disk into different partitions, then installing NAS to one and using the spare partitions for storage, this isn’t recommended. What’s more, some distributions, such as FreeNAS and Rockstor, only work with whole drives and not partitions.
When choosing the installation target for your NAS distribution, remember that the NAS distributions provide a webbased administrative interface that can be accessed from any machine on the network, and thus don’t feature a graphical environment of their own. This means that these distributions don’t require too much disk space for themselves, so it makes little sense to surrender a large capacity disk for installation. Almost all the distributions on our list can be just as easily installed onto a USB drive, which leaves you free to use the disks only for installation. You can also install these distributions onto a SSD drive if you have one handy, but they’ll work just fine even with your regular disk drives. If you’ve never needed NAS before, you can also install these distributions onto a Virtual Box and add virtual disks for storage as required.
FreeNAS, like many other available NAS solutions, is designed around the ZFS filesystem. This provides many of the advanced features typical for NAS, such as data integrity, creating snapshots, deduplication (the ability to remove duplicate copies of data), and so on. NAS4Free and Rockstor also support all the same partitions as FreeNAS. Thanks to its copy-on-write and snapshot features, Btrfs is considered to be a strong competitor to the ZFS filesystem and is the default on EasyNAS and Rockstor.
In addition to support for EXT3/4, XFS, and JFS filesystem, with OpenMediaVault, you also get the option to create quotas for each configured volume and set up access control list (ACL).
The filesystem you choose also depends on the NAS features you wish to exploit. For instance, many ZFS features, such as deduplication, are quite RAM intensive.