Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:01:01 -0500 From: Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> To: FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: hardware for home use large storage Message-ID: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org>
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Hi, I'm looking at creating a large home use storage machine. Budget is a concern, but size and reliability are also a priority. Noise is also a concern, since this will be at home, in the basement. That, and cost, pretty much rules out a commercial case, such as a 3U case. It would be nice, but it greatly inflates the budget. This pretty much restricts me to a tower case. The primary use of this machine will be a backup server[1]. It will do other secondary use will include minor tasks such as samba, CIFS, cvsup, etc. I'm thinking of 8x1TB (or larger) SATA drives. I've found a case[2] with hot-swap bays[3], that seems interesting. I haven't looked at power supplies, but given that number of drives, I expect something beefy with a decent reputation is called for. Whether I use hardware or software RAID is undecided. I I think I am leaning towards software RAID, probably ZFS under FreeBSD 8.x but I'm open to hardware RAID but I think the cost won't justify it given ZFS. Given that, what motherboard and RAM configuration would you recommend to work with FreeBSD [and probably ZFS]. The lists seems to indicate that more RAM is better with ZFS. Thanks. [1] - FYI running Bacula, but that's out of scope for this question [2] - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811192058 [3] - nice to have, especially for a failure.
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