I just finished my server migration and am now serving up CIFS shares from a 4TB RAID1 zpool.  This site is served via a native FreeBSD jail which also handles my email.  It was a bit of a bumpy migration as I suspected my hardware had gone bad.  My original ‘plan’, was to install two new 4TB NAS disks, install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, install ZOL, and transfer the data to a shiny new zpool before my existing raid died (spinning for 4+ years).  Things went fine until a few hours after the transfer completed and then the box started locking up.  I assumed it was a hardware problem as I had rewired all the SATA connections and swapped some memory.

I tried swapping the memory back, moving it to a new bank, fiddled with the bios, but nothing fixed the problem.  Then I thought I’d try the latest FreeNAS just to see if it truly was the hardware and besides… It has zfs and the zpool format should be compatible so why not?  I threw in a  FreeNAS-9.2.1.4 CD and booted it up.  I manually imported the zpool, fixed up the mountpoint’s, then exported and imported using the GUI. That was 3 days ago.

I think I’m going to like this FreeNAS.

Update: Sat Apr 26 09:12:16 MDT 2014

I thought I’d throw in this snapshot for a bit of humor…  Back in 2010 when I was putting this box together, I didn’t have any drive rails and it was late on a Sunday so I manufactured my own drive rails out of some scrap oak I had in the garage.  I had totally forgotten about these until I did this migration.