D510 atom itx
I recently needed a small NAS for offsite backup storage...
I have a two readyNAS NV+ (spark based) boxes from LinkSys and I do like them.... Frys has them on sale from time to time at $450 with two 1TB disk. Big feature is small size and automatic disk expansion. If 4 1TB disk are not enough, just swap them out for 2TB disk one at time and it will auto expand the raid when all 4 disk are installed and in sync. (this take a long time over a few day, also they are moving on to a Intel based system and the price of the new Intel unit is a bit more ...)
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx <---- Spark based unit
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVXPE.aspx <--- Intel based unit
I was recently given a real nice small NAS case from Chenbro, model ES34169 ($113 new) with a internal 120 watt power supply, that has room for 4 SATA drive bays, room for optional optical drive and optional SD card reader... So I decided to build a small headless NAS RAID system...
I use 4 X 500gb disk that I had from a past upgrade to one of my ReadyNAS units, bought an SuperMicro D510 Atom ITX, model X7SPA-H board with processor for $165, 1gb Ram $32, supports 6 SATA and a 1gb USB memory stick (free, I had one). I may order the SD card reader for the case to allow booting from the SD card and this will remove the memory stick from the rear of the unit.
I used a copy of freeNAS 7.1 on an external USB cd drive to load the memory stick and I was up and running in 10 minutes.... no issues other than the fan cables in the case were too short to plug into the ITX board.. (A quick trip to Frys fixed this for $2.50)
Config of freeNAS was easy and allows for many option.... At first I uses standard Raid 5, but after reading the freeNAS forum, I re-formatted and moved to ZFS file system...
The freeNAS project over the last two years has stalled, but in Dec 2009, the project was taken over by IXsystems and in May will release a full re-write under freeBSD 8 and will make ZFS the primary file system for freeNAS. So I decide I should learn about ZFS...
freeNAS has support all of the file sharing option that one could need:
CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, iTunes(DAAP), TimeMachine, BitTorrent server, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target) and UPnP.
It supports Software and hardware RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T/email disk monitoring with a WEB configuration interface.
With all of the power saving option turned on, I get a box that powers down the disk when not in use, slows down the Atom process to under 500Hhz and pulls only 23 watts at idle.
at $0.23/kw that amount to $4.00/month to have it on line.
http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesit...67&PHPSESSID=544f59854527c66a4c8808de9494177c
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H
http://freenas.org/freenas
http://www.ixsystems.com/
), but would rather have the proverbial "hammer-in-the-sandpile" reliability. I'm considering going with one of the ASUS mini-ITX boards for no other reason than I've had great luck with the company over the years. Is this advisable or should I look at other options (Intel, Supermicro, Gigabyte)? Any words of wisdom would be great. Thanks!
