Eric - iX Experience

I bought a FreeNAS mini approx 6 months ago, and it's been great.  Then it started alerting me that one of the drives was having problems.  Since it was so new, it was still under warranty, so I contacted ixsystems (and since I watch BSDNow and TechSnap I had a spreadsheet with all of my drives serial numbers and knew exactly which drive it was).



ixsystems verified that the drive was failing and sent me a replacement.  Meanwhile, FreeNAS had already taken the bad drive offline and removed it from the pool.  When the new drive arrived all I had to do was put it in the caddy, and then click replace.  I had never hot-swapped a drive at home, so that felt weird, but it was awesome.



It really hit me that even though it's this little box that sits under my table, it is a real server and the process I went through was just like what Alan would do in a datacenter (although I'm sure he would use the command line: zpool replace ... )  The people at ixsystems are great too.  You never get someone that doesn't quite understand the problem (which seems so common everywhere else).  They all know exactly what they are doing and they all care.