I'm contemplating building a new 4-Bay NAS box to replace my Netgear Readynas NV+. The Readynas is a fine box, but it does not support drives > 2TB, and it lacks iSCSI and IPv6. Furthermore I think ZFS is a better storage solution than ext3 on raid-5.
I've been looking for the hardware components to use, and this is what I'm planning to use:
This is what I came up with so far, and now I would like to have your comments please. Do you think this a good configuration?
I've been looking for the hardware components to use, and this is what I'm planning to use:
- The NAS case. There are quite a number of Mini-ITX cases that can be used for a NAS box, but just a few are specifically meant for a NAS box. I've looked at cases from Lian Li and others, and although they were fine cases they didn't offer anything more or better than the well known CFI A7879 case. This box has four bays for disk trays, a small 200W power supply that is sufficient for a NAS box, a slot for a PCI bracket, and two USB 2.0 connectors on the front. It would have been nicer if these USB connectors would have been USB 3.0 connectors, but I don't think there is any NAS box with those.
- The Motherboard. I have not found any Intel motherboard (not just Mini-ITX!) with more than two SATA III 600MB/sec. connectors. All other connectors on such boards are SATA II 300MB/sec versions. However I found the Jetway NF82 Mini-ITX board for AMD processors that has six SATA III 600MB/sec. connectors. It also has two GBe ports, not just one.
- The CPU. The NF82 board has been designed for the AMD R-series APUs (APU = Accelerated Processing Unit = CPU + GPU on one chip). There are two dual core and two quad core versions. he R-464 is the fastest APU with four cores and 4MB cache. The GPU is quite powerful, and it would be very nice if the many integer calculations for ZFS could be done by the GPU. I suppose that is not possible now, maybe in the future?
- the RAM. This boards supports two DDR3 SODIMM slots, so it supports a maximum of 16GB and that is what I want to use.
- The Disks. here are only two major disk manufacturers left, Seagate and Western Digital. Western Digital has two families of drives that are specifically meant for use in NAS storage. The first one is the Red series, but unfortunately there is no 4 TB disk (yet). The second series is the Enterprise class RE series, but those are much more expensive. I hope there will be a 4TB Red series drive.
- The cache drive. ZFS can use an SSD drive for caching. I found a drive that seems very suitable for this purpose. It is a Supersspeed S301 60GB drive, and it is the only family of drives that I know of that uses SLC chips instead of the normal MLC chips. SLC chips are far more resilient against wear, so I expect that this drive is far more durable than any MLC version. I hope to use it as ZIL log device and L2ARC cache device.
- The boot disk. It is possible to use a USB stick as a boot device, but I don't like this as a permanent sollution. Instead I found the DeLock Compact Flash reader with a SATA connector. The CF card will behave like any normal disk.
This is what I came up with so far, and now I would like to have your comments please. Do you think this a good configuration?