[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

Fri Feb 19 05:14:19 UTC 2010

Dan wrote:
> Hello Roger.
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:01 AM, general_email at technicalbloke.com <
> general_email at technicalbloke.com> wrote:
>   
<snip>
> Thinking things through Roger.  If I were you I wouldn't touch OpenSolaris
> unless you know what your doing.  I also wouldn't go down the shitty (my
> opinion) NAS boxen route.  I just don't like them.  I find them a compromise
> in to many respects.  Performance, upgradability, interface, etc.
>
> I would build a low price box that had a big case and lots of onboard SATA2
> ports.  Put FreeNAS on there as it's free and fairly simple.  I would only
> use RAID 1.  As you don't want to worry about data recovery for a RAID 5
> system.  Bung in as many drives as you can fit in there.  When the customer
> wants more capacity just bung even more drives in.
>   

Yes, I'm arriving at that conclusion too. I've been running a freeNAS
box I cobbled together from junk for the last 24 hours and I'm very
impressed with it. It looks v.simple to maintain and I like that it has
SSH and NFS, that gives me some flexible backup options.

I was very excited to see it does ZFS too though as they state it's not
production ready yet. In fact I managed to get the server to coredump
several times while reading files that were in the process of being
written between windows and Ubuntu systems via CIFS (probably a rare
need in my clients case but I like to check these things!).
Interestingly it works fine between windows boxen as windows seems to
interpret the write-only lock as a read-write lock and refuses to copy
the file at all. Reading a file via a read only NFS mount that is
currently being written to via CIFS only seems to result in a corrupt
file, not a coredump, although I'd rather not have corrupt files in my
backup either so I'll probably not start using ZFS just yet!

Annoyingly the next version of freeNAS is slated to have production
ready ZFS, it's tantalizingly close too but sadly I don't have time to
hang on for it. Interestingly in both stripe and mirror configuration
the CPU utilization wasn't very high at all even on the ancient 1.2Ghz
AMD I've been testing with. I guess that would go up quite a bit once I
go from 100Mbit LAN to Gigabit speeds though.

> You can do this within your £450 budget.  If they were happy with IDE speeds
> over a Fast Ethernet connection or single gigabit Ethernet, I'm sure they'll
> be thrilled with anything running on dual gigabit with SATA2 drives.
>
>   

Yeah, I think it's going to fly :) I'll have to persuade them to put the
budget up a little though. Here's what I'm thinking of getting them
(might throw in an Intel NIC too actually)...

ASUS P5QL PRO mobo 	£53.00 	£62.28 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149274
Intel Celeron Dual Core E1500 2.2 GHz 	£29.50 	£34.66 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/165381
2Gb DDRII-533 	£28.10 	£33.02 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135599
Case & PSU 	£49.35 	£57.99 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135101
Boot drive (4gb usb stick) 	£6.65 	£7.81 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/159034
Boot drive (4gb usb stick) (spare) 	£6.65 	£7.81 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/159034
SATA Caddy 	£3.90 	£4.58 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/72253
SATA Caddy 	£3.90 	£4.58 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/72253
SATA Caddy (spare) 	£3.90 	£4.58 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/72253
1.5Tb Samsung Ecogreen F2 	£62.05 	£72.91 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/166989
1.5Tb Samsung Ecogreen F2 	£62.05 	£72.91 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/166989
1.5Tb Samsung Ecogreen F2 	£62.05 	£72.91 	
	http://www.ebuyer.com/product/166989
Build 	£150.00 	£100.00 	

*TOTAL* 	£521.10 	£536.04 	

> As for backup solution, I'd recommend an online backup solution as well as
> using a couple of external terabyte drives which they alternate.  That
> should have you covered for speedy recovery through the external drives and
> complete disaster via the online service. 

Yeah, online backup is great, I recommend it to all my customers (almost
all domestic & SOHO so far) but when you start to get up to these sizes
it becomes prohibitively expensive. I don't think they would like the
idea of having to distinguish which files get backed up from the ones
that don't, that's too much hassle. Half a terrabyte from Carbonite
would cost ~ £2000 per year and they might want to backup 3 times that
in theory.

>  One thing I would say once the
> data on the FreeNAS box goes over 1 TB.  You'll need either larger external
> backup drives or use them in pairs which is a bit messy.
>
>   

Yeah, that's the next question, they don't seem unhappy with the
portable drive approach and it's pleasingly cheap (£120 per drive). Part
of me wants to make them a backup server with caddied up drives they can
swap in and out and rotate with others off-site but that would cost
quite a bit more and there's the maintenance burden of having another
PC! It would be nice to have a box to failover to but they already have
unused desktop machines and it would take all of 5 minutes to plug a
backup drive and create a few windows shares in an emergency.

> Just my two sense.  Begin flaming now.
>
>   

No need for flames here, I really value all your input, this stuff is
quite new to me (in practice if not in concept)!

Thanks,

:)

Roger.

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