Small 4 bay (ZFS?) NAS advice please

[simon69c]

Hi

I have been reading this site (and others) for a few days now to try and get an idea of what I am wanting to upgrade to from my Synology DS107 and I am beginning to lean more towards a DIY build and thought it was probably about time to solicit some advice!

I knew I wanted something more resilient than my current unit, and hopefully considerably faster too - so I started thinking about 4-bay RAID NAS's (though I did consider 2-bay too). My initial plan had been something like the ds409slim or the QNAP SS-439 due to their small size (space is limited near my router, which is where I would want it located), but after looking into it I started to wonder if I could be better and/or cheaper myself. I still intend to keep my DS107 as a second backup so I can probably afford to experiment a bit.

With small size in mind, I naturally started looking at Mini-ITX boards and cases, but I quickly found that options were rather limited when thinking about cramming 4 drives in there. Both cases and motherboards seemed to be (understandably) geared more for one or two drives. A few similar DIY projects I saw had gone down the Chenbro ES34069 route - a neat Mini-ITX case with 4 hotswap 3.5" bays, but which weighs in at about £200. I did see another post on a forum (and unfortunately not been able to find it since!) which had a Lian Li Q07 case with a caddy that converted the single 5.25" bay into a 4x2.5" hotswap bay. I have since found that caddy (I think it's a startech one) and after costing it (and a PSU) in, it comes out at ~£130 - a fair bit under the Chenbro price. Obviously I could probably put the startech caddy in any old Mini-ITX case with a 5.25" bay, but the Lian Li did look rather nice and the right sort of form factor I had in mind.

Has anyone had any experience of this caddy (or ones like it) and are there any potential issues I might need to be aware of? The main drawback of course is that it is 2.5" drives rather than 3.5", so pricier and less potential capacity - but the upside would be lower power and probably quieter too. Even with the pricier 2.5" drives, the Lian-Li with caddy would be cheaper than the Chenbro with 3.5" drives.

The next issue of course is which OS and filesystem, as that might have a bearing on the rest of the hardware. I had been reading good things about ZFS (and one of my friends thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread), so I was looking at that as a starting point. It of course means the OS needs to be Solaris or BSD-based as Linux doesn't support it (apart from via FUSE which doesn't seem to be recommended and not something I'm familiar with anyway), and of course WHS certainly doesn't. FreeNAS seems to be the obvious choice as it will hopefully give me all the functionality that I currently use on my Synology (DLNA streaming and backups), which I think I would struggle with if I went for OpenSolaris. I'm not sure how suitable "full" FreeBSD, EON or Nexenta would be in this regard. The potential issue I see with this is hardware compatibility - or should I be ok if I stick with (albeit modern) Intel motherboards? Another thing I'm not too sure on is volume expansion with ZFS. I know I can't (for example) take a 3-disk RAIDZ and add a 4th disk to the same RAIDZ volume, but it seems I might be able to have a 4x1TB RAIDZ and upgrade it one disk at a time to a 4x2TB RAIDZ? Although my initial volume size would probably be ok for the forseeable future, if I do happen to decide to want to start ripping all my DVDs for example, it would be nice to know I could upgrade without having to rebuild the volume.

From what I read ZFS is also a bit of a memory hog (and I guess processor too?), so I'm not sure if an atom-based Mini-ITX board would be up to the job. The motherboard I had initially looked at was the MSI IM-945GC-A (~£150), which includes a 230 Atom but which can only have a maximum of 2GB RAM. If that wasn't up to the job then I had seen the Intel BOXDG45FC (~£90), a socket 775 board. This could take for example an E3300 Celeron (~£37), an E5200 Pentium duo core (~£45), or an E7500 Core2Duo (~£90) and also take more memory (up to 4GB). The Celeron and Pentium duo options would also work out cheaper than the Atom board. A further option might be the Intel BOXDH57JG (~£95), a socket 1156 board. That would enable a 32nm i3 530 (~£90) or G6950 Pentium Duo (~£74) and up to 8GB RAM. I'm not sure whether the 32nm processors might actually use less power than the older socket 775 processors? Might they be better suited to ZFS duties too?

Any thoughts on what I'm thinking of doing? I'd like to stick to Mini-ITX if I can, as space is rather a premium - however if there is a Micro-ATX solution with a case that isn't much bigger than the two I've outlined above I would be interested to hear it - and for reference the Chenbro is 260mm(H)x140mm(W)x260mm(D) while the Lian Li Q07 is 280mm(H)x193mm(W)x208mm(D). I realise that this is probably going to be a bit of overkill, but I am intending for it to be as much a science project as being merely practical - I'll still have a backup of my data on my existing NAS should disaster occur!...

Thanks in advance!

 

[stevech]

Because I have an always-on PC in the garage - running SageTV (Free TiVo), Home automation (HomeSeer), and some apps of mine, it's my NAS too.

Simply RAID0 Sata Pair, and some other drives. Just Win XP with folder sharing. Have run this for years, with XP and W7 and Linux client PCs.

I have several low cost, SMB-based NASes. They are all bad. Crummy features, poor throughput, esp. for the many GB per day of video recorded off the cable here.

Purpose of my NAS is to help protect from drive failure- as it's when, not if.

 

[eon]

I'd say give EON a twirl (but I'm biased)

simon,

I'd recommend a min of an atom 330 (dual core) or better yet one of the newer intel D510 (mount olives) with 4 sata port. Asus makes a nice natural convection board with one drawback, 2 sata ports, but that may be enough with 2x2TB depending on your storage needs. See the dev wish list section on the right hand side, for mini-itx hardware and other HCL info ( http://eonstorage.blogspot.com )

Also, take a look at the wiki (http://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/) to get a little more background to make a better decision. The DIY path will take more work on your part but could yield exactly what you're looking for. EON also runs from USB or CF, which makes it greener than a HD install, since it will be mostly on, that translates to much greener footprint. The boot disk failing will not cause EON to fail as in a conventional HD install.

Hope that helps

 

[simon69c]

Thanks for the replies! I found a really nice article over on linuxtech comparing a whole load of pineview-based boards (So D510, D410 etc.) and there certainly seem to be a few good boards either available now or that will be soon - the Zotac NM10-B-E and Asus Hummingbird looked particularly promising.

I have also found another mini-itx case that might be even better for my needs - the Lian-Li Q08. It's not out yet, but it features a nice big (hopefully quiet) fan and 6 internal 3.5" bays. I'm wondering if it might be just big enough to house the Zotac board (which unfortunately is Mini-DTX formfactor which is 203mm x 170mm rather than 170mm x 170mm of Mini-ITX - think I might email Lian-Li to ask. I don't think hotswap capability would be all that important to me anyway.

The other potential factor I've picked up on recently is ECC memory. Seems a lot of people recommend it when looking at ZFS, though it seems more like a "nice to have" rather than a actual requirement - and it certainly puts the price up substantially (plus no Atoms support it and not many socket 775 / 1156 boards support it either). While investigating that side of things it did get me looking at AMD (since their CPUs and Motherboards seem to support it more), and their Athlon II X2 250u chip looks like it might be an interesting alternative to an Atom with a TDP of just 25W. Appears it is mostly geared toward OEM's though I did find a seemingly reliable seller on ebay who was selling them for £40. There also seem to be a few mini-itx boards that would work with that chip (though none that I could see support ECC - at least not "officially"). Doubt I'll actually bother going for ECC, but I am considering the AMD rather than Atom route at the moment - might be cheaper upfront too.

 

[Jay_S]

The other potential factor I've picked up on recently is ECC memory. Seems a lot of people recommend it when looking at ZFS, though it seems more like a "nice to have" rather than a actual requirement - and it certainly puts the price up substantially (plus no Atoms support it and not many socket 775 / 1156 boards support it either). While investigating that side of things it did get me looking at AMD (since their CPUs and Motherboards seem to support it more), and their Athlon II X2 250u chip looks like it might be an interesting alternative to an Atom with a TDP of just 25W. Appears it is mostly geared toward OEM's though I did find a seemingly reliable seller on ebay who was selling them for £40. There also seem to be a few mini-itx boards that would work with that chip (though none that I could see support ECC - at least not "officially"). Doubt I'll actually bother going for ECC, but I am considering the AMD rather than Atom route at the moment - might be cheaper upfront too.

My two "NASes" are a movie and a music server. While neither runs ZFS, I did dabble with Nexanta, Opensolaris and FreeNAS .7x beta for a long time before giving up on it for my purposes. I *love* ZFS. But I needed other features that were not supported by the OSes that offered ZFS in kernel at that time. Moving on...

ECC is worth the added expense, especially in a 24/7 server. I'm basing this on this report: DRAM Errors in the Wild- A Large-Scale Field Study (pdf). Memory errors are way more common than I ever thought.

My music server is a D510MO Intel Atom board with a single 320GB notebook drive and 1 stock of non-ECC memory. I was willing to forgo ECC in this machine because it sleeps most of the time, and storage size is only about 120GB - I can recover from backups or the original CD's without much effort. My movie server uses ECC though because it's dealing with TB's of data and it's running 24/7.

You don't see ECC support on the Intel side unless you're looking at server/workstation CPU's and chipsets. (Except, strangely, the new Pentium G6950 supports ECC!) On the other hand, I believe every AMD CPU has had ECC support since the original Athlon 64!

That said, it's up to motherboard Mfg's to support ECC in hardware and in BIOS. A lot of Asus boards state explicit ECC support. My Biostar board supports ECC, even though Biostar denies it like crazy.

 

[simon69c]

Yeah if I want to go ECC then it does seem to mean going for AMD if I still want to try and keep power consumption down. Unfortunately mini ITX boards with stated ECC support seem to be as rare as rocking horse poo!

I think I have found one, the IEI Kino 690AM2 (which would hopefully support one of the newer low power AM3 processors), but suppliers of that board seem to be virtually nill - steatite-embedded was the only UK supplier I could find (£167) and they claim a standard lead time of 24 hours but I'm not too sure I believe it as IEI's site claims the board is discontinued! Other than them the only place I could find supplying was orbitmicro.com who are US based. Furthermore the only reference to it supporting ECC RAM was in a manual for it I downloaded from the orbitmicro page as I couldn't even find the manual on the iei website.

I really want to avoid going up to a micro ATX board if I can but it seems that getting ECC support will pretty much require it unless I happen to luck out on an AMD-based mini-itx board that supports it (even if the manufacturer doesn't advertise it).

 

[Jay_S]

Unfortunately mini ITX boards with stated ECC support seem to be as rare as rocking horse poo!

Nice

I really want to avoid going up to a micro ATX board if I can but it seems that getting ECC support will pretty much require it unless I happen to luck out on an AMD-based mini-itx board that supports it (even if the manufacturer doesn't advertise it).

Wow that IEI thing is expensive. £167, yikes. And its rarity probably means support would be a nightmare. I don't know if you have this model in the UK, but in the US the Zotac GF6100-E-E is $50. It's an Am2 board, DDR2, 4 sata ports. I can't determine if it supports ECC ram, but at least it would be cheap to test.

Moving to mATX opens up so many more options. Is "small" a requirement because of where this NAS will be located? If you can stash it in a closet, size/looks become irrelevant.

 

[Jay_S]

Another negative for me with Opensolaris was that CPU frequency scaling was not supported on my CPU. I was using the 45W TDP AMD 4050e CPU. CPU scaling is supported on Phenom and Phenom derivatives. See this 2008 sun.com blog post for more detail: AMD PowerNow! for Solaris. With modern Athlon II's, PowerNow should work. And this issue might not apply at all if you use FreeNAS.

 

[lafleur]

D510 Atom freeNAS 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 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 $4.15/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/

 

[R.G.]

My recent ZFS Server build

I just got my server up and running. I'm sharing a lot of my thinking on my server blog at http://rgkeen.wordpress.com if you're interested in the long version.

I'm using an ASUS M3A78-CM, Athlon II X2 240e, 4GB ECC memory, and six 750Gb disks in the array as well as two 40GB laptop drives for a mirrored boot disk. With all of that mess, it still idles at 100W, which is huge compared to some nets, but it does give me 4+TB of storage and immunity from any two disk failures. The mobo has one IDE cable position and six SATA ports, so all the array disks are on the native SATA ports.

This could easily be pared back to 2 or even 1GB memory, a few 2.5" disks, and get much lower power as well as smaller size.

I had a different set of objectives - data integrity was primary, so that forced ECC, and I could not find an ECC mITX board either. I went with raidz2 for data integrity, which pushed me into six disks. The basic mobo and AII-240e processor with memory is only about 30W. That's partly because the 240e is a selected low power CPU, with TDP of 45W. It actually idles far below that. The recently announced 250u and 260u would be even better if you could find one, at only 25W.

So for a low power version, I'd use an ASUS mATX mobo, 235e or 240e, 1 or 2GB of memory, and notebook disks. The power and size would be quite small. ZFS does like lots of memory, but unless you have a specific over-the-network performance target, it's not such an issue. I was looking for reliable backups.