FreeNAS 8.0.1 brings USB 3.0 support

The FreeNAS developers have announced the availability of a new stable release, version 8.0.1, of their open source network-attached storage (NAS) operating system. The update sees improvements to the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and S.M.A.R.T. services, with USB 3.0 and rsync now supported. Mac OS X users will appreciate the addition of Lion AFP and Time Machine compatibility. Other major improvements include: volume members are now divorced in the database from the FreeBSD devices, ZFS volumes can now be exported via iSCSI, a refactored email backend and vastly reworked snapshot replication.

Some of the most immediate changes from 8.0.0 are in the graphical user interface (GUI). For example, FreeNAS now features an event notification system, which illuminates different colours depending on the severity of the situation. The ability to schedule cron jobs within the GUI has also been added. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, and this latest version uses FreeBSD 8.2-p3, which addresses a buffer overflow and compression bug.

Users running FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA2 or earlier will be unable to perform a GUI upgrade because of a change in image size and must perform a CD upgrade; upgrading from FreeNAS 0.7.x is not supported. Further details can be found in the official release notes and in a press release from iXsystems, the project's development sponsor. FreeNAS source code is hosted on SourceForge and is released under the BSD licence.

See also:

• FreeNAS 8.0 now available, a report from The H.

(crve)