I know I am posting this late in the scheme of things, but a colleague at work asked me this week what I use at home for my NAS. At first, I recommended a Synology DS1512j, but not everyone has that kind of money. He wanted something cheap and expandable. We use Solaris/ZFS on a daily basis to store petabytes of data and I adopted Openindiana 151a as my home fileserver days after its release. Shortly after, HP released the 2nd revision of its Microserver, the n40l. What a great combo! A low powered server that natively supports 4 hot swap disks for $249 on sale? Why not?
Here is the quick run down:
Hp N40l
Amd Turion II Dual Core 1.5ghz
8gb 2x4gb Unregistered DDR-3 ECC ram max
1000G-baseT ethernet
USB/ESata
4x 3.5 Internal hard drive bays
1x 5.25 ODD bay
My personal config adds:
6x 3tb 3.5" Hitachi drives, 2 in the ODD bay
1x LSI 1068e HBA
2x 160gb Intel x25 SSD's in the ODD bay
1x 80gb Intel x25 SSD in the space between the ODD bay and lower case
1x Intel 1000G-baseT PCI-E 1x nic
Running:
OpenIndiana 151a
Napp-It (www.napp-it.org)
This gives me 12TB of storage with Zil and Write cache drives at 30watts! I was so happy with it, I bought a second when they came on sale for $199. It is currently my ESXi NFS datastore configured below:
N40l
8gb Unregistered DDR3 ECC
LSI 1068e
Intel Pro1000 Nic
4x 1.5tb Seagate 7200rpm in RAIDZ
4x 160gb Intel x25 in Raid10
Icydock 4x 2.5 in one 5.25 bay
This serves up 220mbps Write and 680mbps Read! Considering these are older Sata 2 drives and controllers, I am perfectly happy, considering I am limited to a single 1gb link to my ESXi host.
Anyways,
If you are looking for a great home NAS, look no further then a N40l running either Solaris/FreeNas.
I also went the N40L route for home NAS and happy with it so far (after few mods). Just a remark - I do not think it supports hot swap disks, the labels on the bays say "Non-Hot Plug HDD".
ReplyDeleteWhats the chance of providing an end to end installation for this setup, it looks so nice :-). I am a software guy, but my h/w skills are bad.. so will struggle to add the additional drives as the first hurdle.. anyways any further detail would be greatly appreciated.
ReplyDeleteThanks
Sam