Another ZFS NAS

M

monstertruck

n00b
Joined
May 4, 2010
Messages
10
Hi Guys, been reading for a while and learnt a lot. I’ve worked out the following, but still have a few questions and after some general feedback.

I no longer require a desktop computer any more. I don’t really play any games my MacBook Pro can’t play. My desktop currently has 1.5TB fake-Raid5, 1TB fake-Raid5, and 3.5TB external single disks giving a total of 6TB non-redundant storage across multiple volumes.
Looking to replace this with at least 6TB of expandable ZFS storage for sharing over CIFS/NFS to multiple clients, i.e. HTPC, MacBook Pro, etc.


Requirements:
1. 6TB initial ZFS storage for mainly HD movies with room to grow.
2. Headless server.
3. Reasonably portable, would like to be able to take to the occasional LAN.
4. As low power as possible without replacing existing hardware (below) until it dies.
a. Disk spin down when not in use
b. Hibernate/Sleep during the day with scheduled wake up/WoL
5. Reasonable performance. ZFS will take care of itself in this respect really. At least GigE would be good.
6. As quiet as possible.


Existing Hardware:
• Q6600
• 4GB RAM - will upgrade to 4x2GB for 8GB total.
• 8800GT - get rid of this to free up a PCI-E slot, PCI video card or similar.
• P35-DS3P - 2x PCI-E x16 slots (x16 & x4), 3x PCI-E x1, 2x PCI-E
• Misc. HDD's - 3x750GB, 1x640GB, 2x500GB, 1x1.5TB, 1x2TB
• Antec P182 - maximum 14 3.5" bays with 5.25" adaptors
• Corsair HX-520


Bought:
1. 4x2TB Hitachi
2. LSI SAS 3442E-R
a. Expandable with a SAS expander, like the HP ones.


To Buy:
1. Thinking of buying the NZXT Whisper to replace the P182 for a potential maximum of 18 3.5" bays (utilising 5.25" bays with brackets). Only concern is HDD cooling if the 5.25" bays were utilised, although I could probably rig a fan to blow over them if required.
Another option is to get a proper chassis like the Norco 4220 with 20x hot swap bays. Biggest problem is I don't really have anywhere clean to store it. At least a desktop case can go in a corner with a switch and router. Also, not very portable. And loud (pre-modification/fan replacement). And expensive.
2. Dual-port GigE PCI-E 1x Intel NIC or 2x single-port GigE PCI-E 1x Intel NICs.
I understand PCI-E 1x slots have 250MB/s bandwidth, so 2GigE should be fine. Set up link aggregation to easily saturate GigE clients.

OS:
FreeBSD 8.0 or OpenSolaris, ZFS version 14.
Leaning towards FreeBSD at this stage. In my mind, the ease of use of FreeBSD with ports, improved hardware support and ease of configuration outweighs any lag in ZFS releases. The array should be able to saturate GigE anyway.
Because important data would be backed up, also considering running a more recent release of FreeBSD/OSol for (mainly) ZFS dedup.

Data Structure:
4x2TB Hitachi's in a Raidz1 pool. 6TB capacity, expandable with another 4x2TB Raidz1 pool to 12TB, etc.
Once the pools are up I’ll do testing with dummy data to see how the Q6600 copes with varying levels of compression (gzip-9 etc), and what sort of performance I can expect out of it (to determine whether I’ll even use 2xGigE Intel NICs.


Backups:
Thinking important data would be backed up to external drive(s) made up from the old existing drives.



Questions:

OS – FreeBSD vs. OpenSolaris. Thoughts? Is the future of ZFS on OSol a concern with Oracle? Is ZFS implemented well enough on FreeBSD in terms of features/stability/performance to be a worthy alternative?
Anyone running dev releases of ZFS? Worth it for dedup considering it’ll mainly be HD movies?

Data Structure – With the current proposal of a 4 disk Raidz1 pool, 4 disks are used to read/write data. When this expands with another 4 disks all 8 disks would be used to read/write data, correct?
Is there a more power efficient way to structure my pools/disks?

General comments/thoughts?
 
OpenSolaris-based. Nexenta/NexentaStor free. FreeBSD might be a consideration when 9.0 is stable, IMO.
 
I would recommend Nexenta. I've got a 3U Norco running 4 1.5TB drives on it and it's been very stable (ZFS/RAID-Z). It's been running for around four months now and even with as much as I mess with the machine it won't die.
 
Both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris have advantages that you may like or that mean nothing to you.

OpenSolaris may have newer (not so well tested) ZFS as soon as the bugs are ironed out, but Solaris would still lag behind and only update when that version can be considered production quality.

FreeBSD may have some benefits over Solaris/OpenSolaris; for example FreeBSD allows booting from a RAID-Z or RAID-Z2; while (Open)Solaris only allows booting from a single vdev.
FreeBSD may also be more convenient, with the excellent portstree, good documentation and a thriving community; but not as well as Ubuntu Linux for example which has the best user community that i'm aware of.

What i particularly like about FreeBSD, is that mainly the good developers do work there. FreeBSD is king regarding SMP performance, with elements being used in the Firefox and Linux kernel. FreeBSD also imports many advanced technologies, such as the 'best' firewall; OpenBSD's pf, and Sun D-trace could be added to this list as well.

Where FreeBSD lacks is a modern installer; it lacks many options and can be a pain to use for users new to FreeBSD or UNIX in general. It also has only one traditional filesystem with read-write support; UFS. Though UFS is decent; it's no where near the support on Linux for XFS and JFS. It does have read-only XFS support and soon read-only Ext4 support. But to store your files; you can only choose between UFS and ZFS. Not bad, but could be better.

As for future of ZFS, we might see more nice FreeBSD-only features in the future; just like OpenSolaris has a good CIFS-driver where FreeBSD has to do with Samba; which also performs quite poor compared to NFS and FTP.
Generally i feel ZFS is safe now that it's integrated in base FreeBSD distribution. That's a good thing both both us running BSD and Solaris; neither FreeBSD nor Oracle can really kill ZFS now. And it will continue being worked on, even outside of Oracle's help or control.

Dual-port GigE PCI-E 1x Intel NIC
Click to expand...
I think the dualport Intel NIC is PCI-express x4 or 1000MB/s full-duplex. The maximum bandwidth of two gigabit NICs is 500MB/s; <nr_ports> x <duplex> x 125MB/s = 500MB/s
 
sub.mesa said:
FreeBSD may also be more convenient, with the excellent portstree, good documentation and a thriving community; but not as well as Ubuntu Linux for example which has the best user community that i'm aware of.
Click to expand...

Nexenta is the OpenSolaris base and Apt for package management. Ports is way overrated anyway. I'll take almost any modern Linux package manager over it including Apt, Pacman and Portage.
 
For a workstation (GUI) i prefer packages yes, but for a server OS i prefer source built. You shouldn't need to have many packages installed when using it as a NAS. For example with my web-interface it would just need a light webserver and some other packages.

The main thing here is that a lot of software is available, updated regularly and actually works when installed. What i don't like on Ubuntu, for example, is that i had to run Firefox 3.5.x even with 3.6 being released for months. But that's kind of a separate issue to ports/packages really.

FreeBSD is also working on stable ports; ports which are updated much less regularly for those who do not need to always run the latest release versions.
 
IMO, Ports isn't even a good example of such a source-built system. Portage is SO MUCH better than Ports.
 
sub.mesa said:
Where FreeBSD lacks is a modern installer; it lacks many options and can be a pain to use for users new to FreeBSD or UNIX in general. It also has only one traditional filesystem with read-write support; UFS. Though UFS is decent; it's no where near the support on Linux for XFS and JFS. It does have read-only XFS support and soon read-only Ext4 support. But to store your files; you can only choose between UFS and ZFS. Not bad, but could be better.
Click to expand...
I choose gjournalling on UFS for some uses. (SUJ (softupdates
with journalling) ) also has new (beta) support). Maybe trivia
for this thread but maybe relevant to the quoted paragraph.
 
monstertruck said:
Existing Hardware:
• Q6600
• 4GB RAM - will upgrade to 4x2GB for 8GB total.
• 8800GT - get rid of this to free up a PCI-E slot, PCI video card or similar.
• P35-DS3P - 2x PCI-E x16 slots (x16 & x4), 3x PCI-E x1, 2x PCI-E
• Misc. HDD's - 3x750GB, 1x640GB, 2x500GB, 1x1.5TB, 1x2TB
• Antec P182 - maximum 14 3.5" bays with 5.25" adaptors
• Corsair HX-520
Click to expand...
that's almost exactly my current setup. we win one internet.
 
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