FreeNAS 9.3-RELEASE with many new features

Today, December 8, 2014, FreeNAS 9.3 was released. The new version brings some interesting innovations.

FreeNAS offers in the current version not only as usual a selection of plugins like Crash Plan or Bittorrent Syncbut also several innovations to the system itself. The most important:

• New setup wizard during and after installation.
• New updae wizard for easy installation of updates and patches.
• Different update variants, free choice between update "trains".
• "Standard" and "Advanced" menus in the user interface.
• No more tabs in the user interface.
• ZFS for the boot device. This allows it to be mirrored as well.
• Cloned "boot environments" thanks to ZFS. You can switch back and forth between FreeNAS versions.
• Using GRUB as boot loader with several new features.
• Samba is available in version 4.1.12.
• NFSv4 support.
• Various security updates.

The main new features are also summarized in a short video, the complete release notes can be found at here:

I'm going to FreeNAS 9.3 as soon as possible. Here comes still my HP N36L with 8 Gigabyte RAM which is no longer the latest system, but still offers sufficient performance for my application purposes. Who needs more performance (e.g. for transcoding or multiple clients) should look at the current generation of HP Proliant Micro Servers Watch.

The download of FreeNAS 9.3 is available as a 64-bit version as well as a 32-bit version via the FreeNAS website. There you can also get the GUI upgrades from FreeNAS 9.3 download.