[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[Dave Hala Jr]

I've been experimenting with this.  I went with an amd phenom x2 cpu
with a 4gb of ram, and 4 2tb drives.

I setup freenas to boot off a 4gb thumb drive and configured 4 drives as
Raid-Z2 using the sata ports on the motherboard. So far, I'm liking what
I see.  I ordered another sata controller card (no raid) to add some
more drives for experimentation.

It should be interesting to see how it compares to a hardware raid
controller.  My guess so far, is that this is going to be plenty smoking
fast. Freenas likes to have more that 4gb for some caching, so I'm also
going to get some more ram.


:) Dave



On Thu, 2011-08-18 at 12:16 -0500, Nicolai wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 09:04:28PM -0500, Dave Hala Jr wrote:
> 
> > I've still got a need for about 4tb of just general file storage. If I
> > could outperform a ReadyNas 1500 using hardware that I have laying
> > around or an considering taking out of service, its worth considering.
> 
> Hey Dave,
> 
> I asked a friend whose $work has a lot of storage, what they use
> and what he suggests for your 4TB fileserver.  This is what he
> wrote:
> 
>  Server 1: 3ware 9750 8i with 36x2TB drives in RAID6 + hot spare
>  (expensive)
>  Server 2: 24x2TB drives in RAID-Z3 + Solid State Cache
>  (mission-critical, ZFS, freakin' AWESOME)
>  NAS 1: Drobo (www.drobo.com 4x2TB drives; nice features but expensive)
>  NAS 2: Oldass server with 10x250GB drives in software RAID5
> 
>  My recommendation would be three 2TB drives in RAID-Z1 in ZFS. I've
>  found it to be a majestic filesystem. You can drop in a cheap 32GB
>  SSD ($65) for write caching and get some amazing speeds.  Consider:
> 
>  3x2TB Seagate Barracuda XT (7200RPM) = $390
>  3x2TB Seagate Barracuda Green (5400RPM) + SSD Cache = $(240 + 65) = $305
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Nicolai
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