Small Office Hardware

[furicle]

Hi All

I've got an old Gateway desktop running FreeNAS OK right now,
but it's time to make it something better than a cobbled up single drive system

Size, noise and power don't really matter - low cost biggest factor.

I'd like three drives running Raid-Z, dual NICs, and 8 gig of Ram.
Hot swap would be nice, but probably isn't required, and I figure likely adds to the price of a case significantly.

I've browsed a bunch of posts but the systems I've seen are either optimized towards home use, or quite a bit larger than we need.

I'm looking for suggestions for
* appropriate motherboards
* at what point a separate controller is needed
* if you did use a separate controller, is there an inexpensive unit that's nicely compatible?

The iXSystems mini is interesting, but single nic, and freight/customs from US adds to it's price...

 

[furicle]

If we don't need a controller, looks like I could do this for about $350 plus drives in a mini case even....

http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=62523
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=54174
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=53545&promoid=1029

(Asus P8H61I mini ITX, 8G ram, R2 case)

 

[peterh]

If you let go of the "2-nic syndrome" i have good experience with hp-proliamtt n36/n40 units.
At a higher price and noicelevels comes anything from supermicro.

As for controllers, no, you don't need anything beyond sata controllers these days. Anything else is for primitive OS that lacks zfs.

 

[xbmcg]

You will need probably a cpu too... I dont think a virtual vmware cpu would fit in the mobo socket ;-)
If budget is the target, you can try some mini-itx with ION or AMD CPU on board. There are some nice, cheep and
powerfull enough boards out there, even with enough (up to 6) SATA3 Ports on bord...

Why do you need 2 1GB LAN ports?

 

[furicle]

Well, maybe I don't need that second NIC. I was trying to keep it responsive even with a couple of users accessing it at once, and I do have some larger backups going to from/to it at various times.

I figured it could saturate a single NIC fairly easily, so the small investment of a second NIC would be worth it. Am I mistaken?

And yes, that CPU is looking a little thin - say a Core i3 assuming it'll fit in that case - http://ncix.com/products/?sku=58339&vpn=BX80623I32100&manufacture=Intel
Still under $500

 

[xbmcg]

is it just a nas (freeNAS) or do you intent to recycle the board for something else later?
If you just want a nas, a much smaller config will do the job - no need for so much cpu - unless you
want to use all features of zfs (compression, deduplication, encryption). If your goal is just
a simple NAS with some sort of RAID (RAID1 , RAIDZ, RAIDZ2...) you can easyly take a ion
or a AMD equivalent - it needs less power if you run it 24/7, is more silent and fast enough
to saturate the GBit Port(s) with regular SATA3 / SATA3 Disks. Actually the drive speed
and the striping can increase troughput, also if you do not compress / deduplicate etc.
the free RAM is used as cache, what makes a very impressive write performance even with RAIDx.
The CPU almost sleeps all the time...

 

[furicle]

Well, I'm using compression, Active Directory, SAMBA and AFS at the same time, so I figured a little extra CPU was worth it - it's roughly $50 from a dual core to an i3

So you feel it could easily max out a single gig card? So I'm not silly for wanting a second?

 

[peterh]

Well, maybe I don't need that second NIC. I was trying to keep it responsive even with a couple of users accessing it at once, and I do have some larger backups going to from/to it at various times.

I figured it could saturate a single NIC fairly easily, so the small investment of a second NIC would be worth it. Am I mistaken?

And yes, that CPU is looking a little thin - say a Core i3 assuming it'll fit in that case - http://ncix.com/products/?sku=58339&vpn=BX80623I32100&manufacture=Intel
Still under $500

The NIC probably not be your limiting factor. And if it would become it's easily replaced with a 10G
( or several 1G ) later on.
Your CPU might not either be your limiting factor, i guess that memory and number of discs
would be the most limiting items ( memory : more is better, disk more is better)