BYO Low-power server

[akatsukix]

Like everyone else here, I am trying to figure out how best to build a home server for media use. The problem is, of course, that I don't want to compromise on certain things, but it seems a bit difficult to sort through old threads to determine what would work best.

1. Low power?

Would a modern laptop processor be better than an older chip? It would let me use newer motherboards... Given the further specs below, what would work best? Are there 750GB or 1TB drives that I can use that have a low power draw and low heat?

2. Silent case?

I want probably six drives, and while the case may sit out of the way, I would like it to be relatively unobtrusive looking and not too large. Silent is essential. Hell, I thought about repurposing an old Power Mac cheese grater case, but I have no idea what the hell is inside that thing. Smaller would be better.

3. RAID-Z

So that means Solaris, right? I have never used Solaris so I am not too keen on trying it out. I would rather use Ubuntu server personally, but I do want the ZFS advantages.

4. iSCSI vs. traditional NAS NFS

How do they differ? It seems to me that iSCSI is the superior method of access, as you can address at the block level like a physical device.

 

[Tangent inc.]

this all depends on a target idle and load power usage you are aiming for...

singe board computers are the fastest way to low power systems but also an expensive route if you want to use powerful cpus.

there is no such silent case. any sturdy case will have less vibration but the amount of sound leaving your case depends on the parts you place in it and the care you put into absorbing any sound that is left.

i dont know much about file systems but i am learning that on my own as of yet.

if you are going to use 3.5" drives keep in mind they use the same amount of power as the better SBC's per unit. if you are ok with this then you will be fine. as for what bus to use i am not sure.

i am building a 16 drive array with dual core uatx, lsi 16 channel pcie host controller 2 gigs of ram and a pcie gigabit nic. i was originally going to go with freenas but i think for my household WHS is going to be a better fit. i cont mind noise because it will be in a closet and the hot air is vented outside of the house. i am planning on about 450 watts under full load but home storage should never reach that high in my house. idle will be around 200watts with wd 1tb drives.

i put a lot of planning and thought into making my media center quiet and my next step is 250gig notebook drives as that is the only thing i hear now.

 

[gryphon]

I'm probably in a minority here, but I've worked with ZFS extensively (Solaris Sysadmin) and personally I don't think that Raid-Z is that great - it doesn't really give you anything more at the management level than LVM + MD, and you can't expand a raid-z array after you've built it ( you can expand the volume(pool), but you have to add a whole new raid-z array, including another parity disk). Linux/MD Raid 5 on the other hand lets you add disks to an existing raid5 array.

Although I will say, the Raid-Z inflight parity stuff is pretty cool - I've dd'd /dev/urandom onto one disk in a raid-z array, and the data coming out the other end stayed clean.

Up to you, but just bear in mind that Raid-Z isn't the wonderful land of milk and honey that some of the documentation tends to infer.

 

[akatsukix]

@gryphon-
I do like some of the advantages of RAID-Z, but I agree that the whole not being able to add drives thing sort of sucks. From what I understand though, I could just toss is extra "placeholder" drives on the initial pool and then replace those as I add actual needed storage. Not an ideal solution and wasteful, but I didn't program the thing.

I just figure that ZFS has enough advantages in data security that it would probably be worth it. Again, my main concern is Solaris, something I have little familiarity with...

@Tangent-
Lower power is obviously better. I really don't expect to be doing anything else with this machine besides streaming media files over the network. Pretty much the plan is to:
1. Run Time Machine for my Macbook Pro
2. Serve media to my XBox 360 and MBP
3. Run bit torrent and other downloading programs

I would prefer Linux personally. If I could figure out whether it was possible, I would just build a Hackintosh with Leopard Server, but I haven't been able to find out whether anyone has done it with Server yet.

 

[gryphon]

@gryphon-
I do like some of the advantages of RAID-Z, but I agree that the whole not being able to add drives thing sort of sucks. From what I understand though, I could just toss is extra "placeholder" drives on the initial pool and then replace those as I add actual needed storage. Not an ideal solution and wasteful, but I didn't program the thing.

I just figure that ZFS has enough advantages in data security that it would probably be worth it. Again, my main concern is Solaris, something I have little familiarity with...

If you'd like to go with ZFS, I wouldn't worry too much about not being able to find your way around solaris - Solaris 10 is pretty close to linux, you'll pick it up easily. There are a few differences around how it handles disks that may trip you up - solaris uses a /dev/dsk/c0t0s0 style layout, rather than /dev/hd*, but once you get used to it, its not too bad.
There are a couple of reasonable package managers for it, but unless you're doing lots of stuff with it, just downloading the appropriate packages from sunfreeware.com and installing them manually is just about as easy.

Not sure about the whole placeholder thing - you can add disks to a pool at any time, but if you want the Raid-Z stuff (including that swanky data redundancy), you need the disks in a Raid-Z array, which becomes a member of a ZFS pool. You can grow the pool by adding more disks, either in a new, seperate Raid-Z array ( and losing another disk worth of space to parity), or by adding them individually, but then the data on the new disks isn't replicated anywhere, and doesn't benifit from the on the fly error correction.

If you're keen on trying ZFS, i'd suggest you have a play with a Virtual Machine and some loopback devices to get a feel for it.