Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 01:15:24 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net> To: Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> Cc: FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: hardware for home use large storage Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1002090103520.982@hotlap.local> In-Reply-To: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org> References: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org>
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On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote: > 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. I recently had to put together something very cheap for a client for disk-only backups (rsync + zfs snapshots). As you noticed, rack enclosures that will hold a bunch of drives are insanely expensive. I put my "wishlist" from NewEgg below. While the $33 case is a bit flimsy, the extra high-cfm fan in the back and the fan that sits in front of the drive bays keeps the drives extremely cool. For $33, I lucked out. > 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. For home use is the hot-swap option really needed? Also, it seems like people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons. There seem to be no decent add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that weird supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit. I did "splurge" for a server-class board from Supermicro since I wanted bios serial port console redirection, and as many SATA ports on-board that I could find. > 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. I've had two very different ZFS experiences so far. On the hardware I mention in this message, I had zero problems and excellent performance (bonnie++ showing 145MB/s reads, 132MB/s writes on a 4 disk RAIDZ1 array) with 8.0/amd64 w/4GB of RAM. I did no "tuning" at all - amd64 is the way to go for ZFS. On an old machine at home with 2 old (2003 era) 32-bit xeons, I ran into all the issues people see with i386+ZFS - kernel memory exhaustion resulting in a panic, screwing around with an old 3Ware RAID card (JBOD mode) that cannot properly scan for new drives, just a total mess without lots of futzing about. > 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. Here's the list: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=8441629 Just over $1K, and I've got 4 nice drives, ECC memory, and a server board. Going with the celeron saved a ton of cash with no impact on ZFS that I can discern, and again, going with a cheap tower case slashed the cost as well. That whole combo works great. Now when I use up those 6 SATA ports, I don't know how to get more cheaply, but I'll worry about that later... Charles > 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. > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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