New DIY NAS build

[mergwyn]

I currently have a ReadyNAS NV+ that has worked well but that I have now decided to replace as it is too slow. After some experience of using Debian squeeze on another server and inspired by the experience of other people in the forum, I decided not to buy an off the shelf NAS but to build my own.

My proposed build is:

• CFI A7879 Case, £89
• E35M1-I DELUXE (5xSATA, 1eSATA, USB3), £91
• OCZ Technology 32GB Onyx 32Gb, £50
• Kingston Valueram 4GB (2 x 2GB) 1066MHz, £22
• disks in from my existing NAS
• OS Ubuntu Server
• Total £252

Case
I also considered the Chenbro es34169 but decided that the extra £30 was not justified.

Motherboard/CPU
I chose this over something like the Gigabyte GA-D525TUD with Intel Atom D525 as I the CPU is a little faster and 5 xSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports, 1 xExternal SATA 6Gb/s and 2 USB3. I figure this gives me better performance and more options.

I want the NAS to be efficient but powerful. Is it worth spending the extra to get a mobo capable of taking a i3-2100T? This has a higher TDP but I understand is v good when idling (which the NAS wil l do most of the time)

OS
Which file system is recommended. I was planning to use ext4 in a RAID 5 eventually, but wondered if XFS will be better? I have also been reading about ZFS, but that would push me towards Opensolaris with which I have no experience. I am also concerend about ZFS performance and a relatively low powered CPU.

I am also toying with the idea of using the box as a VM server, either using KVM, VMWare or Cisco. Will this be powerful enough, and what, if any impact will there be on performance.

I welcome your thoughts and opinions!

Many thanks
Mergwyn

 

[blueacid]

I've got an hp microserver, paid under 150 for it new. There's a massive thread about them in the servers section of the board.

I've kept the stock hardware (1gb of ram being the most significant). I've added four 2TB drives and have them in a zfs raidz-1 with zfs-fuse under Debian Squeeze.

My requirements weren't raw speed but just to have a massive amount of storage & for it to sustain playback to a couple of htpcs. The machine can saturate a gbit link when i'm reading from the drives, writes are quite slow at about 30MB/sec. That said, i'm normally only filling it with backups etc so forme that's no concern. I've made no effort to tune the performance as for my domestic setting these figures are more than sufficient.

Any questions you have, just shout

 

[mergwyn]

I've read that thread and with rebate it looks really good value. I might even be the "smart" choice, but I do have a hankering to DIY!

30 Mbs writes using fuse seems very reasonable. As I understand it ZFS-fuse is not the fastest performer. Are you getting > 100 MBS reads?

 

[blueacid]

Not quite, about 90 MB/sec sequential. That's tested over gigabit though so I suspect the network is the bottleneck there. I'll see about running some proper I/o tests tonight.

Yes, zfs-fuse is slow and inefficient but for me the data integrity of zfs was a real draw; something I was willing to sacrifice speed for.