Category Archives: FreeNAS

DYI NAS: Part2

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I was able to spend a little more time gathering some numbers around performance and power usage over the last couple of days so I figured I would share a little bit about what I was able to learn from the build I described in part1.

Power usage:

After purchasing a ‘Kill A Watt’ from Home Depot, I set out to try and determine how many watts were being drawn by my mini-itx NAS.

Luckily the ‘Kill A Watt’ is a device that is very easy to setup and use, so it did not take me long to discover the following: the server consumes around 50 watts during start-up. After the boot-up process has finished, the power consumption levels off to right around 34.5 watts.  According to the Kill A Watt, that amounts to less then $3.00 per month…not bad as far as I am concerned.

Various attempts to lower that usage even further resulted in very little drop in that number, I believe that I could have knocked off a couple of watts had I removed one of the DIMM’s and ran the server with 1 DIMM and 2GB of RAM instead of 2 DIMM’s and 4GB of ram. I decided that having the additional RAM was worth the few extra watts that could be saved.

Network performance:

Using a Netgear Gigabit switch and a couple of cat6 cables I was able to achieve transfer speeds of 29 MB/sec over samba between FreeNAS and my Mac laptop. Throughput numbers over my Linksys 10/100 WRT54G wired network ports were less stellar, I saw throughput of around 7.1 MB/sec.  The wireless numbers were not as good as I had hoped, however they are probably what I should have expected for a shared 802.11g link, between 1 and 2 MB/sec.

Being that this is an ‘archive’ of sorts I can certainly live with those numbers for now, my main focus on this particular project was stability, reliability and redundancy.

DYI NAS: Part1

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A few weeks I decided to do some research into what it would take to build a NAS unit that would act as a storage server for all of my digital assets (audio, video, images, etc). I had purchased a 500GB external HD from Bestbuy about a year ago, however recently I was having problem reading the drive from my Linux laptop (since then I have not had any problems reading that same drive from my new MacBook Pro).

That was enough to scare me into investing a little bit more time and money into something that provided a higher level of  fault tolerance,  and might also lead to some more restful nights as well.

HARDWARE:

My initial requirements were not super hefty, I knew I wanted the following:

1)relatively small form factor case
2)a unit that consumed relativity little power
3)would allow scaling up to at least 4 drives
4)a 64 bit CPU and a motherboard that would handle at least 4GB of RAM
5)a setup that would allow me to use ZFS as the backend filesystem

After doing some initial research, I came across the case that I thought would be perfect for this build, the Chenbro ES34169. This case fit several of the requirements, it was small, I could use a mini-itx motherboard and it provided a backplane for at least four hot swappable 3.5 inch hard drives.

After finding a case that I was fairly sure I was going to use, I set out to find a motherboard that would allow for at least 4 SATA devices and work well with with OpenSolaris, EON, Nexenta or FreeNAS.

Initially I really liked the GA-D525TUD from GIGABYTE.  It  has 4 SATA ports, can handle up to 4 GB of RAM, has a built in Intel Atom D525, and was priced very reasonably priced at right about $100.  The one huge downside of this motherboard was the onboard Realtek NIC.  I came across several posts (here and here for example) that indicated that reliability issues existed with these types of NIC’s, and that I was better of using an Intel chipset instead.  Since this server was mainly going to be used as a file server, network performance and  reliability were imperative, so I was going to try and avoid a motherboard with a Realtek NIC if possible.

I also found the JNC98-525E-LF from JetWay, this motherboard had a lot of the same appeal of the GIGABYTE motherboard, however it also had an HDMI port, a DVI port and analog audio outputs as well.  I think this motherboard would be a good pick if I was building a media server instead of strictly a storage server . This motherboard also used the Realtek chipset for networking as well, so I decided to continue my search.

When everything was all said and done, I went with the MBD-X7SPA-H-O from Supermicro.  This board has 6 SATA ports, allowed 4GB of RAM, came with a 64-bit processor, an on board USB port (which would allow me to hide my boot device inside the case itself) and most importantly had two Intel based network cards.  This motherboard was a bit pricey at right around $200, however I guess you are paying extra for the extra SATA ports and the extra NIC.

I found 4 GB of cheap Kingston RAM, so the only thing left hardware wise was to decide what type of hard drives I would purchase and how many.  I decided that I would use two WD20EADS 2TB hard drives from Western Digital.

The only real issue that I ran into with this setup was the fact that there are very few mini-itx motherboards that support ECC RAM, which is a must have for enterprise level storage setups, however I was not willing to spend the extra money for an enterprise level mini-itx board which sells for about $1000.  My other option was to scrap my plans for a really small form factor mini-itx based setup and go with something bigger like an micro-atx or regular atx motherboard, where I am sure I would have an easier time finding ECC support.

I decided that I would give up the ECC RAM option in order to gain the benefits that come with a much smaller machine.

SOFTWARE:

I went back and fourth between using EON, OpenSolaris and FreeNAS.  I liked EON because it has a very small footprint, it could be installed on a USB flash drive, it was based on OpenSolaris and had a stable ZFS implementation.  The downside of using EON for this project is that it would require a bit more expertise to configure and administer.

I have a good amount of OpenSolaris experience, and they have obviously the most stable ZFS implementation that exists, but it think that it is overkill for this machine, and I am also not a big fan of what Oracle is doing right now in terms of the open source community, so I decided to look a little closer at what FreeNAS had to offer.

FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based NAS distro, that has a very nice web interface that allows you to configure almost all aspects of the server from any web browser.  Research indicated that they had a stable and reliable ZFS port in place, I would be able to install and boot the OS on my usb flash drive, and if I got hit by a bus, one of my family members would have a better chance of being able to figure out how to retrieve the data…so FreeNAS it was.

In Part 2 of my post I plan to provide some more details about overall power use and network performance.