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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After creating three different system configurations (Athena,
Supermicro, and HP), my configuration of choice is this Supermicro setup:
1. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
2. SuperMicro 5046A $750 (+$43 shipping)
3. LSI SAS 3081E-R $235
4. SATA cables $60
5. Crucial 3×2G ECC DDR3-1333 $191 (+ $6 shipping)
6. Xeon W3520 $310
Total price with shipping $1560
Details and links at http://dan.langille.org/2010/02/14/supermicro/
I'll probably start with 5 HDD in the ZFS array, 2x gmirror'd drives for
the boot, and 1 optical drive (so 8 SATA ports).
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