New ZFS Home NAS Build

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FrozenPie

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Jul 13, 2011
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I've been lurking here for a while now and reading about ZFS has caught my interests. I want to build an efficient low power, good performance NAS for my home network as my summer project before school starts.

My network includes: a Motorola SB6120 modem, Netgear WNDR3700 router, Trendnet TEG-S80g switch, connected to 6 clients (an Ubuntu 11.04 desktop, a Windows XP desktop, a Windows Vista laptop, Windows 7 desktop/laptop, and a Macbook)

The NAS will just be a media server to store all of the music and photos scattered throughout the family's computers. We have less than 1 TB of photos and music accumulated over the past few years, so I'm thinking an 8TB (5 x 2 TB raidz1) storage will be more than enough for the next 3-5 years at our rate.

My budget is around $750ish. I already own a case and a spare 2.5'' 160 GB drive for the OS.

Components to purchase:
$40 PSU: SeaSonic SS-300ET Bronze 300W
$80 CPU: Intel Pentium G620
$120 RAM: G.SKILL Value Series 8GB DDR3 1333 (2 x 4GB) x 2 for 16GB
$80 HDD: HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 2TB x 5 for 8TB raidz1
$80 MOBO: BIOSTAR TH67B mATX
$25 NIC: Intel PRO/1000 CT PCIe


A few questions:
1) Which OS? Solaris Express 11 + Napp-it, OpenIndiana + Napp-it, NexentaStor Community Edition + Napp-it, or FreeNAS lol? I'm interested in SE11 and OI and learning how to use them. I've also check their HCL but dont see anything about the mobo, soo...
2) Do I need an additional Intel NIC or will the onboard Realtek 8111E suffice?
3) I'd also like to have an efficient idle power consumption. Should I stick with the 300 W or do you guys think a picoPSU-150-XT can handle the start-up of 6 HDD in this setup?
4) Is 16 GB of memory overkill for 8TB of storage?

Anything else I need to look over and think about?

Thanks!
 
Hardware looks good.

1) I'd go with OI or SE11 personally, especially if you're wanting to learn to use Solaris. FreeNAS would be the simplest solution probably, however.
2) Realteks tend to shit the bed under high load. For how little they cost, just go Intel.
3) That seasonic shouldn't draw a whole bunch of power. You could enable spindown or other power-saving measures. It's worth noting that drives only draw a few watts each at idle.
4) 8GB would probably be plenty. More can't hurt though. You can always add more if you need to.
 
For something as important as family photos, I would recommend going RAID-Z2 though. As you say, you dont need huge amounts of storage space, so using an extra drive for security could prove to be money well spent. Remember that RAID is never a backup, though. If you need the space and still have to stay within budget, buy an extra disc and 8 GB RAM instead of 16 GB.

I agree with Jesse on all points, but I do think the Realtek NIC will suffice if you don't have an absolute need for speed or expect lots of simultaneous connections.
 
I agree. I'd go with a RAIDz2. Even if you keep the same number of drives and drop back to 6TB. Motherboard has only 6 ports anyway and I assume you want to just use those to keep cost and power down. You did say you had less than 1TB data now. 6TB is still a huge amount of free space.
 
Cool thanks!
Trying to keep everything really simple, I'll stick with SE11, grab the Intel NIC, and go with 5 x 2 TB raidz2 for sure. I'll also just stick with 16 GB since ram is super cheap anyways.

I'm ordering everything but the HDDs tonight; waiting a few days to check out slickdeals for some 5k3000 deals :).
 
Sounds like you have a good plan already. Regarding the ram, I've read a good rule of thumb in ZFS is to plan for 1GB per 1TB of storage. ~8GB would be sufficient, 16GB would give you some room to grow.
 
agheno said:
Sounds like you have a good plan already. Regarding the ram, I've read a good rule of thumb in ZFS is to plan for 1GB per 1TB of storage. ~8GB would be sufficient, 16GB would give you some room to grow.
Click to expand...
Meh, I'm running 20TB (usable) at 6GB of ram (virtualized in ESXi, 12Gb to the host). I'd kill to have 16GB but can't currently justify that purchase, though I would probably blow that on more VMs than giving it to the ZFS-OS.

As a NAS I can easily saturate my GigE connections. My work load varies, typically its 3-4 thick clients accessing the network over GigE and wireless. But there are 2 DCs that do hourly backups via iSCSI to zvols and 2 other vms on the same host that do pretty constant writes/reads

If I was concerned about integrity I'd be running ECC memory, but that's just me. Supposedly folks are saying it isn't necessary, but I'm a stickler about end-to-end integrity when it comes to my data. I'll echo the raidz2 recommendation.

PS This is a home environment, if I was at work I'd throw as much RAM as I can at it. and a few SSDs.. if only the folks at work were willing to use ZFS-based OSes... geez even just as a NAS it can fulfill a lot of requirements compared to more costly solutions. I'd love to try FC with Comstar
 
My computer is currently being shipped. I was about to order 5x2TB raidz2 5k3000 until I saw these Hitachi Deskstar 3 TB CoolSpin on slickdeals. Data sheet here says they're 512k sectors.

SOO quick question is: spend $400 on 5x2TB drives in raidz2 or $321 3x3TB drives in raidz1?

I'm leaning towards the 3x3 setup since both have 3 year warranty, these are cheaper + retail boxes, free up satas, and perhaps less chance of DOA drives. I do have a Flickr pro account (unlimited photo storage) so my pics are safe there.

I'll be ordering those tonight. Hope everything works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks everyone!
 
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The 3x3 setup goes back to only a single partiy disc. I'd be shy about that myself. If you lose a disc you have no redundancy during a potentially very long rebuild time with such large discs. I still vote for the 5x2 RAIDz2 setup. It's just less risk all around. For only $80 more and two more drive slots it seems worth it.
 
Big disks can take long time to repair the raid, if you exchange a broken disk for a new disk. Repair of a raid creates lot of stress on the other disks. If you encounter a read/write error then you loose all your data. Future 4-5TB disks might take several days to repair the raid. This is because disks is getting bigger, but not much faster.

If you have raidz2, you dont loose your data if one disk breaks, because raidz2 allows two disks to break. Most probable scenario is one disk breaks, and another gets read/Write errors.

If you are going to use large disks, you should really use raidz2 setup.

I would say 8 disks in raidz2 setup. In the future you can swap one 1TB disk to a 3TB, and when you have swapped every disk, you have a larger raid. I suggest you read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity
 
A couple of points: unlike hardware raid (and some software raid), with zfs, you won't lose all data if there is one or more URE during resilvering - just file(s) on the block(s) in question. Also, with zfs, only blocks used are read during resilvering, not the whole disk.
 
danswartz said:
A couple of points: unlike hardware raid (and some software raid), with zfs, you won't lose all data if there is one or more URE during resilvering - just file(s) on the block(s) in question. Also, with zfs, only blocks used are read during resilvering, not the whole disk.
Click to expand...

OK, so I read the Wikipedia article on ZFS, and I'm sold. (I worked at Sun during the "glory days" in the 90s. Sad to see what happened ...) So if I have a Windows-only home network, how can I set up a ZFS-based NAS?
 
I would install openindiana with napp-it as the management GUI (from napp-it.org). You can share "filesystems" using CIFS trivially easily.
 
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