hardware for home use large storage

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking at creating a large home use storage machine.  Budget is a 
> concern, but size and reliability are also a priority.  Noise is also a 
> concern, since this will be at home, in the basement.  That, and cost, pretty 
> much rules out a commercial case, such as a 3U case.  It would be nice, but 
> it greatly inflates the budget.  This pretty much restricts me to a tower 
> case.

I recently had to put together something very cheap for a client for 
disk-only backups (rsync + zfs snapshots).  As you noticed, rack 
enclosures that will hold a bunch of drives are insanely expensive.  I put 
my "wishlist" from NewEgg below.  While the $33 case is a bit flimsy, the 
extra high-cfm fan in the back and the fan that sits in front of the drive 
bays keeps the drives extremely cool.  For $33, I lucked out.

> The primary use of this machine will be a backup server[1].  It will do other 
> secondary use will include minor tasks such as samba, CIFS, cvsup, etc.
>
> I'm thinking of 8x1TB (or larger) SATA drives.  I've found a case[2] with 
> hot-swap bays[3], that seems interesting.  I haven't looked at power 
> supplies, but given that number of drives, I expect something beefy with a 
> decent reputation is called for.

For home use is the hot-swap option really needed?  Also, it seems like 
people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey 
hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons.  There seem to be no decent 
add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that weird 
supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit.

I did "splurge" for a server-class board from Supermicro since I wanted 
bios serial port console redirection, and as many SATA ports on-board that 
I could find.

> Whether I use hardware or software RAID is undecided.  I
>
> I think I am leaning towards software RAID, probably ZFS under FreeBSD 8.x 
> but I'm open to hardware RAID but I think the cost won't justify it given 
> ZFS.

I've had two very different ZFS experiences so far.  On the hardware I 
mention in this message, I had zero problems and excellent performance 
(bonnie++ showing 145MB/s reads, 132MB/s writes on a 4 disk RAIDZ1 array) 
with 8.0/amd64 w/4GB of RAM.  I did no "tuning" at all - amd64 is the way 
to go for ZFS.

On an old machine at home with 2 old (2003 era) 32-bit xeons, I ran into 
all the issues people see with i386+ZFS - kernel memory exhaustion 
resulting in a panic, screwing around with an old 3Ware RAID card (JBOD 
mode) that cannot properly scan for new drives, just a total mess without 
lots of futzing about.

> Given that, what motherboard and RAM configuration would you recommend to 
> work with FreeBSD [and probably ZFS].  The lists seems to indicate that more 
> RAM is better with ZFS.

Here's the list:

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=8441629

Just over $1K, and I've got 4 nice drives, ECC memory, and a server board. 
Going with the celeron saved a ton of cash with no impact on ZFS that I 
can discern, and again, going with a cheap tower case slashed the cost as 
well.  That whole combo works great.  Now when I use up those 6 SATA 
ports, I don't know how to get more cheaply, but I'll worry about that 
later...

Charles

> Thanks.
>
>
> [1] - FYI running Bacula, but that's out of scope for this question
>
> [2] - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811192058
>
> [3] - nice to have, especially for a failure.
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