New NAS Project

[shaitan667]

Hi all. First time poster here.

I have just recently purchased a HP N40L Microserver with the intention of using at as a NAS.
So far I have installed the hacked BIOS to enable AHCI on all ports and enable Hot plug on all ports. Also loaded it up with 16GB RAM (Recognised in BIOS, ESXi 5 and Nas4Free without issue), and an Intel 520 120GB SSD.
I will be getting two WD Red 3TB drives this week, and two more next payday (two weeks time).

I am looking to use Nas4Free - it looks to have quite a nice feature set and an easy to use web interface.
I was going to use RAIDZ - reading up a little bit, this will only give me performance equivalent to one drive - is this correct? Will using the SSD as a ZIL and L2ARC drive help performance in this case?
Would it be worth running as a VM on top of ESXi 5? I figure this would be easier for setting up the OS - can use the one SSD for the OS, ZIL and L2ARC - or would this negate the effect of a ZIL and L2ARC drive, being all on the same drive?

Would there be any advantage to running say, FreeNAS 8x over Nas4Free? I guess the main reason why I am going for Nas4Free is built in torrent client, DLNA, etc that come by way of extra plugins for FreeNAS.

Also - I got given an Intel four port gigabit NIC from work that was no longer needed (this one - http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Intel-E1...work_Cards&hash=item2eb5d814d6#ht_4122wt_1163
- will using this help reduce CPU load over the onboard NIC?

Or has anyone got any suggestions as to how to this up? I would like this to be as fast as possible (if only to live up to the "Speed Demon" sticker that came with the SSD haha)

 

[diizzy]

1. RAIDZ will give you better performance than a single drive but you'll need at least 3 drives minimum although your CPU will probably limit performance somewhat in the end.

2. N4F is based on FreeBSD 9.X-serie AFAIK which is to prefer when it comes to ZFS in my experience. Unless you have a need for virtualization I'd skip it, it introduces more things that can go wrong (tm).

3. There's no point going for a 8.X base (FreeNAS) vs 9.X (N4F) at least looking at the ZFS and hardware support.

4. The Broadcom based NIC is pretty good, unless you also want to run it as a router or something don't bother.
//Danne

 

[MrDudeMan]

16GB of ram for a NAS is extreme overkill.

 

[diizzy]

Going below 4Gb made ZFS run out of memory quite often when I had a 4x 1TB array running RAID-Z.
//Danne

 

[shaitan667]

Thanks diizzy. I ended up ordering two of the Reds online yesterday, so should have all four by early next week. Will do some testing and post the results.
As for the NIC, I might put it in my ESXi host.

MrDudeMan - I have read that ZFS can be pretty RAM hungry - eg 1GB RAM recommended for each Terabyte of storage. I would rather have more than not enough.

I guess I should mention what general usage would be -

I guess I should mention what typical usage would be –

AFP(netatalk) for time machine backups of various Macs (PowerMac G4 DP, PowerMac G5 Quad, C2D Mac Mini, C2D MacBook Pro)
Streaming media to an Apple TV 2(running XBMC) via SMB, and another media center (XBMC) via SMB
Torrents
Backup and storage of my media (Steam Library backup, ISO's of all my games, 7-20GB rips of my blurays (so they can stream to the Apple TV, and so I don't scratch them as I am terrible with discs)
A work colleague and I would like to setup some sort of replication between our servers (Running a small test domain that would be migrated to the nas, includes A DC running AD, WSUS, WDS, a seperate VM running Sharepoint 2010, and a few client VMs)
iSCSI (or NFS – still not sure on how each work/perform) for my ESXi host