[PLUG] WD 4TB Red drive failure...

[Michael Christopher Robinson]

Tests by Preheim suggest that my drives are actually fine.  So I'm
looking at a software problem.  I upgraded to FreeNAS 9.10 U3, I 
think the problem lies there.  Seems iX Systems is having trouble
and from a web search for FreeNAS 10, I found out that the release 
was abandoned.  FreeNAS 11 is the next major release, but it isn't
out yet.  I guess it isn't stable yet.  The next version of FreeNAS 
is supposed to support Docker, whatever that is.  I used the jails 
of FreeNAS 9.10 to run PLEX media server and it worked until a few
weeks ago.

Is there an ideal Linux based alternative to FreeNAS?  The major
benefit of FreeNAS is that it is supposed to be optimized for storage
management and ZFS is supposed to be an especially good file system for
archival purposes.  Another advantage of FreeNAS is that it installs to
a cheap USB memory stick.  Another positive is that FreeNAS can be run
headless.  The support for jails of FreeNAS 9.10 allows one to run PLEX
media server safely.

I'm very concerned that FreeNAS worked fairly well until I upgraded 
it.  I'm also wondering if FreeNAS is open source or not.  FreeBSD
based OSes don't have to be open source if I'm not mistaken.

What Linux distributions are ideal for building network attached
storage systems?  Is there a well supported Linux distribution 
that runs: Apache, Samba, Plex media server, ZFS or something better,
Dirvish or something similar for backup, and RAID all from an 8 gig
USB memory drive?  Maybe using standard ext3/4 file systems is a 
better idea.

I wonder if the software upgrade to 9.10 U3 is the problem or if the
USB memory key corrupted?

     --  Michael C. Robinson