I faced a similar conundrum and in the end went for an HP Microserver G8. They have 4 sata bays, plus as card slot. They have USB3. ILO remote management. Very quiet and cheap. I pimped mine up a bit with more memory and a CPU supporting VT-d:
https://www.quernus.co.uk/2015/08/26/upgrading-hp-microserver-g8-with-xeon/ I wanted ZFS for storage and OpenBSD due to easier IPSec configure and general networking and security awesomeness. So I went for hybrid approach and run OpenBSD under bhyve on FreeBSD: https://www.quernus.co.uk/2015/07/27/openbsd-as-freebsd-router/ This gave me the best of both worlds on a single physical box. -Matt â Matt Hamilton Quernus m...@quernus.co.uk +44 117 325 3025 49b Easton Business Centre Felix Road, Easton Bristol, BS5 0HE Quernus Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 09076246 > On 20 Sep 2015, at 02:33, Predrag Punosevac <punoseva...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Router and file server are two very different things. I recently went > through similar process. Even though at work I use Atom servers > (naturally running OpenBSD amd64 port) for all our core network > infrastructure and services I entertain the idea of buying non amd64 > hardware. I looked at the state of armv7 port. I vetted all PR claims > about Ubiquiti ERLite-3 and ended up buying this > > http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard > > as a router for my home network. (Don't worry the board is available and > you can buy it from Amazon). > > File server is more interesting problem in my opinion. At work I use ZFS > as our main file system to store data and run dozen of FreeBSD file > servers. I also tested DragonFlyBSD and HAMMER1. I am three-way split > when it comes to a home file server. > > 1. I don't like diversity at home so OpenBSD would be the first choice. > 4TB HDD are cheap enough and I could mirror (RAID 1) all my personal > data on two of them. There are two options for mirroring. Either use > softraid or get a cheap used Areca hardware RAID card of e-bay. Those > cards according to man pages have excellent support on OpenBSD (they are > true open hardware). Use one of inexpensive Celeron based motherboards > (you can get them under $50). I would be curious what OpenBSD gurus have > to say about their experience with Areca on OpenBSD and building a > OpenBSD file server in general. > > > 2. Use the same hardware as above with DFBSD but take advantage of > HAMMER1. You could use just 2HDD. Set master PFS in one hard disk and a > slave PFS in the other disk. For more than 2 disks I would use Areca > hardware RAID cards. Note that HAMMER1 is network aware so it is > tempting to set up slave PFS on a remote machine. > > > 3. Just use ZFS/FreeBSD as I am doing at work. End up paying big bucks > for Celeron or Atom motherboard which supports ECC RAM and at least 8 > perhaps 16 GB of it. You will not find those for $100 and the RAM ain't > going to be cheap either. You might want to consider HBA like LSI SAS > 9211-8i (those themself cost on e-bay around $100). This is by far the > most expensive solution. Having a "proper" remote backup using ZFS > replication would involve seting up two such server. > > > Predrag
