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Drobo alternative

S

steakman1971

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 22, 2005
Messages
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I have a DroboFS that may be failing on me. I'm trying to figure out what to replace it with - currently leaning towards a Linux tower with drives in a RAID array.

My main use for the DroboFS was to store videos and backups. It's at my house and gets a decent amount of usage from my family (mainly streaming videos).

I have an older Core2Duo (think 8 gigs of ram, but might only be 4). If this system was running something like FreeNAS, do you think it would have the horsepower? (I'll be honest - the DroboFS was not the faster system in the world. My guess is the FreeNAS system I'm thinking about would smoke the Drobo).

Any other suggestions? I'm looking for cheaper right now, but would be willing to plan out a larger purchase.
 
No reason not to try hardware you already own. I'm using a Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM and it doesn't need even a quarter of the CPU power. File serving is not exactly processor intensive. Although, maybe you have more family members than me. I'm just using an install of Ubuntu Server with minimal packages, it's also configured as a web server because I sometimes take contracts for web applications.

Performance is pretty good, I can get it to saturate my 1Gb wired Ethernet connection and that's all really care about. I'm using an array of 4 2TB Seagate Barracuda Greens.
 
A Core2 Duo with 4-8 GB RAM is better than that what you find in most commercial Nas boxes If you build a NAS based on ZFS, you will also get a much higher level of datasecurity with checksums and snaps and an always consistent filesystem. As ZFS is opensource and does not require a special raid controller you can move such disks to any other system that supports ZFS. The in ZFS included Arc read cache that uses all free RAM gives you best of all read performance.

You can pair this filesystem with software raid for redundancy, either with concepts like snapraid (raid alike backup on demand) or ZFS software raid that gives realtime protection and a higher performance as you can read/write from several disks simultaniously.

ZFS comes from Unix and Solaris where OS integration is best with the fastest SMB server that offers Windows ACL and previous versions. Check Oracle Solaris, NexentaCore, OmniOS or my napp-it for webmanaged appliances.

Other options are based on BSD, another Unix flavour with FreeNAS or Nas4Free as a web-appliance or any Linux distribution with ZFS support.

Especially as a web-appliance, management is easy.
 
Sounds like a plan. I'm going to pick up another 3T hard drive (so I would have 4x3T) for the system. I have a left over 120gb SSD (bought a 480gb recently on sale and switched my 120 out for this) - so that will be my OS disk. I think I'll go with Ubuntu server.
 
FreeNAS is a good alternative OS for a file server. Runs off an 8GB USB Key drive too.
 
I think I'm moving forward with FreeNAS. They recommend a minimum of 8GB RAM. My Core2Duo system has 6GB, What sucks it is it DDR2 - expensive and not as easy to find as DDR3.

Any thoughts on this? I could buy more ram but hate paying the expensive DDR2 prices.

I would be running SAB, Sickbeard, CouchPotato, and possibly a few other services. I have a family of four that will be doing a lot of streaming

This same system is currently running Ubuntu doing everything listed - except it was not acting as a NAS. My Drobo handled this.
 
I was rummaging through my old computers and found a forgotten Athlon II system. It is DDR3 and currently has 4 GB of RAM. If I upgrade the ram, any opinions on how this system would do with something like FreeNAS?
It's dual core, 3 ghz. I had been using it for XBMC but quit using it after I started using Plex.
I believe the Core2Duo would technically be more powerful, but buying DDR2 ram is expensive and I'm bettering this would be fine for what I want to use it for.
 
I would not sweat minimum recommended ram so much. I mean at work where I have 20+ users and over 70TB of raid (serving medical images) I have 2 or 3 zfsonlinux servers with less than 8GB of ram. Only my 25TB+ system has 8GB of ram.
 
Are you using ufs or zfs? I've been reading that zfs like a lot of memory.
My system is not mission critical. Still research using one vs the other at this point.
 
I am using zfs on these systems. 2 of them use raidz2 one uses raidz3 and the 25TB+ system with 8GB of ram uses two 7 disk raidz2s in a pool.
 
ZFS likes ram, sure. But you don't need it, per-se. The more you have, the more it can cache though.
 
FreeNAS is definitely an option. If you want another ready out of the box solution, try Synology. Slightly pricey.
 
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