ZFS, Time Machine, Raid and other redundant storage solutions Part 2
Of course the first raid options I looked at were the prepackaged items from Buffalo, Infrant and a couple of lesser known names (like Thecus)I dug up on Newegg.com. These were attractive options because they are pretty much idiot proof. In my initial stages of searching I was a little put off that I had to buy disks with the units however with a little bit of work I was able to find diskless versions of each of these. So I started digging into the specs. Most of these systems have pretty modest specs, they are not powerhouses as they do not need to be playing demanding games nor do they need to be able to serve files to thousands of people at once. Still I have to admit I am a performance geek so I carefully considered each spec and decided what would work best for me. First I looked at the drive format; I already had several Western Digital 500GB RE2 SATA II hard drives laying around so I wanted to take advantage of that performance. To my surprise Many of the prepackaged options were limited to SATA I (150MB/s) controllers!
This is the original reason why I decided to investigate building my own file server. Now I am pre disposed to DIY projects. I should mention that subsequent to my research several companies have come out with newer options that support SATA II. I also have a hardwired Gigabit Ethernet network in my home so and onboard 10/100/1000 Network card was required several of the newer products also have this. The Infrant ReadyNas Pro however does not come in a diskless version and the base version is $2000! It is nice to have such a small form factor device but when I already have my own hard drives $2000 is a little above my Price Range. I also wanted a solution that wasn’t necessarily limited to only 4 or 5 hard drives. Now had I been starting from scratch then maybe I would have considered the benefits worth the Price Tag. As things were though however, I ruled out prepackaged solutions as either not having the Specifications I was looking for or being too expensive.
So I decided to build my own box. It seemed like a great idea since most modern motherboards (including my own Mac Pro Motherboard although I don’t have access) include raid 5 functionality. This opens up the possibility of basing the raid directly out of the motherboards BIOS! My other option would be to use a software Raid solution; in particular I looked into Linux ext3 raid 5, Freenas and openfiler. I also looked at Resync and Time Machine as ways of doubling up my data.
In the next Part I will continue talking about hardware options I considered. I’ll follow that up with writing about Linux vs. FreeBSD/FreeNas vs. Openfiler and my discovery of ZFS. I’ll probably give ZFS it’s own section and follow up with a conclusion. If there is not any information in any section I do not touch on please leave a comment and I will be glad to amend a section to include what you are looking for:)
May 29th, 2008 at 22:03
Interesting. I’d of course be quite interested in what you think of NexentaStor as well which is an OpenStorage application built on ZFS.
May 29th, 2008 at 22:31
I have in fact looked at NexentaStor and in fact I will include that when I write about ZFS, I should have mentioned it in this post along with Openfiler and Co. NexentaStor looks like a great solution although their licensed version is priced for enterprise level clients. It is incredibly awesome that they make a version that supports up to 2TB! Unfortunately for me I need more than 2TB (I do a decent amount of video editing and have huge music, movie and photography libraries). I do definitely plan on using NexentaStor to test out ZFS but will most likely be choosing between FreeNas (depending on how well they implement ZFS) or the full version of Solaris 10. I think that the Macforge Project (moving the fully functional ZFS to OS X) will not realistically be ready for some time. Thank you for bringing up NexentaStor I will not forget to include it:)