I just built my first NAS box for home use. The build is similar to this one. It is tweaked towards energy efficiency and was not overly expensive. It consumes around 20W idle in total (excl. drives, incl. PSU), which I think is quite good. I suppose that the PSU is quite inefficient at these low loads (<5% of max rated). There is a discussion here that a new kernel can switch off the graphics part and save another 3W. Another great overview is posted here. Maybe a future FreeNAS version will incorporate this.
Parts
1 x Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case w/ 300W SFX PSU
1 x Intel DN2800MT
2 x 4GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR3-1066
2 x Delock MiniPCIe I/O PCIe full size 2 x SATA 6 Gb/s
1 x SYBA SY-PEX40040 SATA III 1 Internal, 1 External 6Gbps Ports
1 x takeMS USB drive, USA version ;) (pdf link)
Comments
Total cost was at around €350.
The cards and the mainboard give a total of 7 SATA ports and 1 eSATA port.
8GB RAM is supported and works well (pdf link). I suppose 16GB would also work.
The only issue is the non-ATX power connector of the mainboard. But there is a simple solution for this.
The PCIe full card fits well in the half slot of the board. I used two rubber bands to hold it in its place.
Mods
The PSU fan is considerably noisy. It is rated at 0.23A@12V (2.76W). I changed it with a SILENX Ixtrema Pro fan, which is completely silent and uses around 2W less. The PSU is rated for 300W, so I figured that less airflow wouldn't hurt if it runs at 20W most of the time.
[To do] Change system fan to this one.
[To do] Add HD44780 display.
Tests
Two old 250GB drives in ZFS stripe mode give the following results:
I will test more when I get new drives. System specs for now:
CPU scaling seems to work well:
Available frequencies are:
The 3 SATA cards are based on the Asmedia ASM1061 controller, which uses PCI Express 2.0 x1. This should give 250 MB/s per port. However, the NM10 chipset apparently only supports PCIe 1.0 speeds, eventhough Intel claims sth else. This is confirmed by "lspci -vvv", which shows a speed of 2.5GT/s. In addition, CPU and chipset are only conncted by two DMI lanes, which means 500 MB/s in each direction.
Parts
1 x Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case w/ 300W SFX PSU
1 x Intel DN2800MT
2 x 4GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR3-1066
2 x Delock MiniPCIe I/O PCIe full size 2 x SATA 6 Gb/s
1 x SYBA SY-PEX40040 SATA III 1 Internal, 1 External 6Gbps Ports
1 x takeMS USB drive, USA version ;) (pdf link)
Comments
Total cost was at around €350.
The cards and the mainboard give a total of 7 SATA ports and 1 eSATA port.
8GB RAM is supported and works well (pdf link). I suppose 16GB would also work.
The only issue is the non-ATX power connector of the mainboard. But there is a simple solution for this.
The PCIe full card fits well in the half slot of the board. I used two rubber bands to hold it in its place.
Mods
The PSU fan is considerably noisy. It is rated at 0.23A@12V (2.76W). I changed it with a SILENX Ixtrema Pro fan, which is completely silent and uses around 2W less. The PSU is rated for 300W, so I figured that less airflow wouldn't hurt if it runs at 20W most of the time.
[To do] Change system fan to this one.
[To do] Add HD44780 display.
Tests
Two old 250GB drives in ZFS stripe mode give the following results:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/Old/ddfile bs=2048k count=5000 10485760000 bytes transferred in 56.165008 secs (186695603 bytes/sec) 10485760000 bytes transferred in 56.814647 secs (184560858 bytes/sec) dd if=/mnt/Old/ddfile of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=5000 10485760000 bytes transferred in 49.413047 secs (212206302 bytes/sec) 10485760000 bytes transferred in 48.807493 secs (214839144 bytes/sec)
I will test more when I get new drives. System specs for now:
CPU scaling seems to work well:
Code:
# sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 498 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 199 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 1862 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 1330 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 931 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 698 # sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 598
Available frequencies are:
Code:
# sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq_levels dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1862/2000 1629/1750 1596/1650 1396/1443 1330/1300 1163/1137 1064/950 931/831 798/600 698/525 598/450 498/375 399/300 299/225 199/150 99/75
The 3 SATA cards are based on the Asmedia ASM1061 controller, which uses PCI Express 2.0 x1. This should give 250 MB/s per port. However, the NM10 chipset apparently only supports PCIe 1.0 speeds, eventhough Intel claims sth else. This is confirmed by "lspci -vvv", which shows a speed of 2.5GT/s. In addition, CPU and chipset are only conncted by two DMI lanes, which means 500 MB/s in each direction.
Code:
LnkCap:Port #0, Speed 5GT/s, Width x1, ASPM L0s L1, Latency L0 <512ns, L1 <64us LnkSta:Speed 2.5GT/s, Width x1, TrErr- Train- SlotClk+ DLActive- BWMgmt- ABWMgmt- LnkCtl2: Target Link Speed: 5GT/s, EnterCompliance- SpeedDis-, Selectable De-emphasis: -6dB