On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking at creating a large home use storage machine. Budget is a
concern, but size and reliability are also a priority. Noise is also a
concern, since this will be at home, in the basement. That, and cost, pretty
much rules out a commercial case, such as a 3U case. It would be nice, but
it greatly inflates the budget. This pretty much restricts me to a tower
case.
I recently had to put together something very cheap for a client for
disk-only backups (rsync + zfs snapshots). As you noticed, rack
enclosures that will hold a bunch of drives are insanely expensive. I put
my "wishlist" from NewEgg below. While the $33 case is a bit flimsy, the
extra high-cfm fan in the back and the fan that sits in front of the drive
bays keeps the drives extremely cool. For $33, I lucked out.
The primary use of this machine will be a backup server[1]. It will do other
secondary use will include minor tasks such as samba, CIFS, cvsup, etc.
I'm thinking of 8x1TB (or larger) SATA drives. I've found a case[2] with
hot-swap bays[3], that seems interesting. I haven't looked at power
supplies, but given that number of drives, I expect something beefy with a
decent reputation is called for.
For home use is the hot-swap option really needed? Also, it seems like
people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey
hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons. There seem to be no decent
add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that weird
supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit.
I did "splurge" for a server-class board from Supermicro since I wanted
bios serial port console redirection, and as many SATA ports on-board that
I could find.
Whether I use hardware or software RAID is undecided. I
I think I am leaning towards software RAID, probably ZFS under FreeBSD 8.x
but I'm open to hardware RAID but I think the cost won't justify it given
ZFS.
I've had two very different ZFS experiences so far. On the hardware I
mention in this message, I had zero problems and excellent performance
(bonnie++ showing 145MB/s reads, 132MB/s writes on a 4 disk RAIDZ1 array)
with 8.0/amd64 w/4GB of RAM. I did no "tuning" at all - amd64 is the way
to go for ZFS.
On an old machine at home with 2 old (2003 era) 32-bit xeons, I ran into
all the issues people see with i386+ZFS - kernel memory exhaustion
resulting in a panic, screwing around with an old 3Ware RAID card (JBOD
mode) that cannot properly scan for new drives, just a total mess without
lots of futzing about.
Given that, what motherboard and RAM configuration would you recommend to
work with FreeBSD [and probably ZFS]. The lists seems to indicate that more
RAM is better with ZFS.
Here's the list:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=8441629
Just over $1K, and I've got 4 nice drives, ECC memory, and a server board.
Going with the celeron saved a ton of cash with no impact on ZFS that I
can discern, and again, going with a cheap tower case slashed the cost as
well. That whole combo works great. Now when I use up those 6 SATA
ports, I don't know how to get more cheaply, but I'll worry about that
later...
Charles
Thanks.
[1] - FYI running Bacula, but that's out of scope for this question
[2] - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811192058
[3] - nice to have, especially for a failure.
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