Agreed! I’ve been running FreeBSD on various computers for very close to a decade now, and still run it on my mail server, but one problem that I faced a couple of years ago when I sold my old laptop, which I was running FreeBSD on, was that my other computer at home at the time was running Linux but I had an external HDD that I’d been using with the laptop and which I was using GELI encryption on.

Since I didn’t have money for any more hard drives at the time, I couldn’t transfer the data to anything else. So then when I wanted to access that data I’d do so via a FreeBSD VM running in VirtualBox. The performance was... not great.

I took the data that I needed the most, and for the rest of the data I let it sit at rest.

This week I wanted to use the drive again, and in the end because I was doing general cleanup, I decided to install FreeBSD on my desktop temporarily.

I actually love FreeBSD but the reason that I prefer to have my desktop running Linux is in big part because I want software on the computer to be able to take advantage of CUDA with the GTX 1060 6GB graphics card that I have in it, and unfortunately only the Linux driver by Nvidia has CUDA, the FreeBSD driver by Nvidia does not.

I was actually looking at installing VMWare vSphere on the computer instead, so that I could easily jump between running Linux and running FreeBSD with what I understand will probably be good performance compared to VirtualBox at least. But the NIC in my machine is not supported and vSphere would not install. I found some old drivers, messed around with VMWare tooling which required PowerShell, and which turned out not to work with the open source version of PowerShell on any other operating system than Windows. So then I downloaded a VM image of Win 10 from Microsoft [0], and used that to try and make a vSphere installer with drivers for my NIC. No luck at first attempt unfortunately. A decade ago I probably would have kept trying to make that work, but at this point in my life I said ok fine fuck it. I ordered an Intel I350 NIC online second-hand for about $40 shipping included, and the guy I bought it from sent it the next day. It is expected to arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, I installed FreeBSD on the desktop. When the NIC arrives I will do some benchmarking of vSphere to decide whether to use vSphere on the desktop or to stick to either FreeBSD for a while on that machine or to put it back to just Linux again.

Anyways, that’s a whole lot more about my life and the stuff that I spend my spare time on than anyone would probably care to know :p but the point that I was getting to is that, with OpenZFS 2.0 I will be able to use ZFS native encryption instead of GELI and I will be able to read and write to said HDD from both FreeBSD and Linux.

I still need to scrape together money for another drive first before I can switch from GELI + ZFS to ZFS with native encryption though XD

Oh, and one more thing, with the external drive I was having a lot of instability with the USB 3.0 connection on FreeBSD, leading to a bit of pain with transferring data because the drive would disconnect now and then and I’d have to start over. But yesterday I decided to shuck the drive – that is, to remove the enclosure and to connect the drive with SATA like you would any other regular internal drive. It worked out excellently, the WD Essentials enclosure was easier to pry open than I had feared, and a video on YouTube showed me how to do it [1]. As prying tools I used a couple of plastic rulers. As a bonus, it also looks like I/O performance is better with the direct SATA connection than what I was getting with the USB 3.0 connection.

Speaking of that, some people have reported finding that the drives in their WD Essentials external drives were WD Red HDDs. I didn’t have the same luck with mine; mine was WD Blue. But idk if WD Red is even common with the capacity that mine has anyways. Mine is “only” 5TB and I think the people that have been talking about finding WD Red drives in theirs has bought 8TB models often. Idk. The main thing for me anyways is just to have my data and someplace to store it ^^

[0]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

[1]: https://youtu.be/QApvLyorr3g