On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Predrag Punosevac <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
The OpenBSD/SR RAID1 with checksum support is my future way for backup server here. Coming from Solaris/ZFS domain I prefer software raid over hardware so I'd not use hardware raid card unless it may be switched to JBOD mode. > 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. ECC is a must also on OpenBSD. It's not particular requirement of ZFS. Anyway, ZFS itself does not require insane amount of RAM if you do not consider dedup support. I remember running SXDE on AMD64 with 1GB RAM and using that as a developer workstation for a year or so before upgrade in the past. I've tuned some ZFS arc caching value somewhere and it was running smoothly then.
