ZFS server for less than 500?

T

TigerLord

[H]ard|Gawd
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A colleague asked another colleague if he could build a ZFS server for less than 500$. I said no. He then corrected and said "500$ without HDD costs", and I still said no. Another colleague, we'll call him Dr Mundo, disagreed and said it can be done on the cheap.

I was curious and looked around. Even for a home use running Openindianna with just a couple 2TB drives, there's no way to even do it under 900$, let alone 500$.

Am I missing something here?
 
Any 7-series or later ASUS mobo with integrated graphics EXCEPT for the FM1/2 socket mobos + any modern Sempron, or Athlon, or Phenom, or FX AMD CPU (even a Sempron 140 will do fine if it's just a home ZFS server, obviously you will need more CPU power if you want to do something other than occasional file server duties) + some ECC RAM + some hard drives + power supply and case + your free ZFS software of choice (e.g., NAS4Free) = ZFS server.

It's costlier up front (but a bit more energy-efficient) to go Intel due to the costly mobos that support ECC, but some of the lower-end Intel CPUs support ECC, such as the G2120 Pentium 22nm.
 
hp microserver, since I'm assuming this is just for a home nas type setup. Add 8gb ecc and you are out the door (without HDD) at $350 max & 40 watt power consumption with low power drives (like wd reds).
 
Less than $500 with no disks? Too easy.

AM3 Mobo ~$50 (Preferably one with a Broadcom NIC)
AM3 Athlon Dual Core ~$50
500w PSU ~$50
Nice Case ~$100
16gb DDR3 ~$100
IBM BR10i or M1015 + Cables ~$100

Thats $450
 
The board I'm using in my sig below supports ECC memory, and the cpu was very inexpensive, both were total less than $175. Freenas runs well, nice speeds. Spent the vast majority of thet budget on disks. Added an intel nic ($20) and hba ($150) for super easy compatibility. Also got 4x1GB DDR3 ECC sticks for free, so that helped. but still.
 
Rock solid reliable build, with remote management, and plenty of upgradeability:

Supermicro x9scl-f: $160
W1600EB8GM 8GB ECC DDR3: $55
Intel Pentium G2120: $80
total: $295

Supports 6 drives, and leaves: $205 for a case+PSU. If you want to use all 6 as data drives, run the system off of a decent USB thumb drive. The SuperMicro board has ports on the inside for just that purpose.

To add support for 8 more drives, add:
IBM M1015(or equivalent) ~$75 + cables ~$30

Leaves: $100 for a case+PSU, a little tight. Could go BR10i instead of M1015 for as low as $25, but they don't support HDD sizes over 2TB.


If you go AMD, like leeleatherwood mentioned, you can shave up to ~$100 on the motherboard, and up to ~$40 on the CPU. Downsides of going AMD are slightly slower CPU, slightly slower onboard SATA, no remote management, likely issues with running more than 1 HBA in a PCIe slot at 8x, and most likely non-Intel NICs.
 
Why not? You can get an AMD E350 board and chip for $74.00, an ITX case for 40, 8GB of ram for like $35 and two hard disk for just under $200.... a free Operating system and you have a mini ZFS server that rocks@!
 
usually the controller cards are the most expensive but as everyone above suggested, using rebranded lsi raid cards from server pulls will get you a pretty badass controller for cheap
 
A zfs server is just a normal computer so of course it can be under 500.
 
stewartjm said:
Rock solid reliable build, with remote management, and plenty of upgradeability:

Supermicro x9scl-f: $160
W1600EB8GM 8GB ECC DDR3: $55
Intel Pentium G2120: $80
total: $295

Supports 6 drives, and leaves: $205 for a case+PSU. If you want to use all 6 as data drives, run the system off of a decent USB thumb drive. The SuperMicro board has ports on the inside for just that purpose.

To add support for 8 more drives, add:
IBM M1015(or equivalent) ~$75 + cables ~$30

Leaves: $100 for a case+PSU, a little tight. Could go BR10i instead of M1015 for as low as $25, but they don't support HDD sizes over 2TB.


If you go AMD, like leeleatherwood mentioned, you can shave up to ~$100 on the motherboard, and up to ~$40 on the CPU. Downsides of going AMD are slightly slower CPU, slightly slower onboard SATA, no remote management, likely issues with running more than 1 HBA in a PCIe slot at 8x, and most likely non-Intel NICs.
Click to expand...

The SFF-8087 cable for the M1015 can be had much cheaper than $30. About $10 from Monoprice.
 
Why not just go shopping for a workstation by HP/Dell/Fujitsu/Lenovo/* in that case off eBay?
//Danne
 
would a refurb workstation support ECC and Openindianna or some other free ZFS OS?
 
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