Hello Everybody,
I am new to this forum and would like to introduce myself.
My name is Christian and I am based in Germany, I have same older (2009) experience with a FreeNAS 0.6.9 based selfbuild, that runs fine up to now with 2 2TB WD10EADS disks.
That NAS was sporadically on only and based on a Gigabyte C7 Board with 1GHz Processor and 512 MB of RAM.
It booted from Compact Flash 256 MB and had a 100TX LAN adapter onboard.
It was running a SW RAID 1 1TB Mirror
The reasons that now persuaded me to go away from that working systems are:
- Network architecture has grown to 1 GBit LAN and allows more throughput - NAS becomes bottleneck. ITX board not upgradeable other than with 1GBit PCI card. It is above my knowledge to find and implement a suitable 1GBit PCI card supported by FreeBSD
- SATA ports are limited to 2, boot device is attached to PATA (Compact Flash)
- I want to grow the RAID to RAID 5 or 6 with 5 disks a 1 TB to reuse the old disks to grow storage space (Although in ~10 years I did not manage to fill 1TB, only half of it )
- Implementation of backup I have never gotten down to...this should change
With all that in mind I searched the market for suitable devices:
- was looking for affordable miniservers from various brands like QNAP , Synology and HP... etc... etc... Relatively soon I decided to go for a self build NAS again for cost reasons. It still seems cheaper and more expandable/flexible. Probably not as userfriendly.
- shall be as expandable as possible for limited cost - SATA ports (5 min), Backup eSATA prefered,1 GBit LAN and (!!) Wifi to move gigabytes around. I plan wifi as a nice-to-have for the reason I could delete the cables when sacrifcing bandwidth. I'd be interested if this works.
Finally I settled on a used AMD E350 2 Core ITX Board, ASUS E45M1-Deluxe, which I got of eBay for an affordable price, plus 4 GB (2x2) of Kingsten DDR3 10600.
There are 5 SATA onboard and 1 eSATA port for backup, all 6GB/s, there is Wifi and USB3 as well....Wifi sits in a small MiniPCIe slot that could pot. be used for something else like bootdrive on SATA controller or something like this.
I'd like to reuse my old 3.5" WD disks, they are old but still good, to keep cost low.
I'd like to extend this with 2x 2.5" disks for power dissipation and space reasons. I can go for 3.5" drives too though. There is on other 1 TB drive on my TV for USB recordings I can potentially rip off that too... My Panasonic though does not record onto networks unfortunatly...
An option is to sell the 2 WD 3.5" disks and obtain 4-5 new 1 TB disks in smaller formfactor and with less dissipation.
The performance of nowadays 2.5" drives is quite nice and they should be good enough for a that file server.
My existing case should be re-used, with mods, it can handle up to 5x 3.5"drives with some hacksaw work.
I don't want to go much larger, the current one is nice and small and can basically placed everywhere.
I have to admit though I fell in love with the white Fractal Node 304... very nice housing with 6 3.5" bays in a more desktop, cubic style!
And off course - after reading across the net - openMediaVault should be the firm/Software.
OMV will be residing on an old 40 GB 1.8" HDD I have, which shall be connected to USB. Hope booting from USB with IDE attached drive works with no issues but I have my doubts.
Fallback will be a cheap 32GB SSD on one of the SATAports, may it be a PCIe or MiniPCIe attached one. But that cost I'd like to save first for an additional datadisk.
What I always disliked about freeNAS 0.6.9 Muad'Dib that it wasn't very easialy controlable for the non-BSD-Pro.
I had my limits with unix like systems but once it worked I basically never touched it again.
Being afraid that the UFS filesystem will not mount/rebuild in a failure case not knowing what to do then is also on reason for change.
This is one thing i am going to try during the setup process: Disconnecting drives, Will backup work and so forth.
Of course I also have questions.
Here are some:
- Disk combi: 2x 3.5" SATA II drives and newer 3x 2.5" SATA III in a RAID 5 or 6: will this have performance issues? Anybody of you guys have a similar combi?
- Booting: I do have a USB attached IDE drive for booting. But that probably doesn't work because of missing support during boot right?
- Concatenating RAID1s: can a 1 TB and a 2 TB Mirror be concatenated to one 3TB drive in OMV? Creating a pretty secure RAID 10 would waste a lot of space when using 2x1TB and 2x2TB...
Thanks