Anyone here run a NAS?

[Too Many Cochranes]

As I'm becoming more domesticated (fancy that), we've now got an upstairs telly with a Raspberry Pi connected and the little media PC in the living room.

We've got home plug network adaptors connecting the two together. When we're in bed I leave the PC on downstairs to stream stuff to the Pi. As two recovering alchies, we usually fall asleep and the downstairs PC gets left on all night.

I've just bagged a cheap third home plug off eBay and it should be arriving today. I've got a rather dated looking Pentium D with no hard drive tucked away in the spare room and the idea is to pull the media hard drive from downstairs PC and load it into the redundant Pentium machine in the spare room and run FreeNAS on it from a USB stick. I got the Pentium machine from a mate for free when I upgraded his computer.

This should serve both upstairs and downstairs tellies for all of our media streaming requirements in the short term but I'm not keen on the long term electricity cost of running an eight year old Pentium D (915 processor) and old socket 775 motherboard 24 hours a day. Plus it's got a 300w power supply in it, which is way too much oomph for a NAS box.

I'm well keen on the new Intel Bay Trail motherboards. Only £50-ish for the latest technology, they look more than powerful enough to run a NAS and consume only 10w power!

Or there are some cheap ready made NAS boxes on Amazon for around £100 that you can just connect up and bung a hard drive in.

I don't really want to spend more than £100 lest the girlfriend go mad at me for wasting money. I like the idea of FreeNAS and Bay Trail because I'm a compulsive tinkerer.

Any nazzers here? What do you think? Wilbur? Are you there?

[Zetetic]

I had been running an HP MicroServer N40L, running Debian off a USB stick, and it was working fairly well. The only real minus for me was the rather noisy PSU.

(Unfortunately, direct sunlight appears to have taken its toll and the USB stick doesn't seem to be in a bootable state as of a few days ago.)

[Too Many Cochranes]

Those HP machines look decent enough but higher power consumption than I'm ultimately going for. The one you mentioned, Zetetic, is 150w supply.

I've got FreeNAS running from USB stick over homeplug now, with no drives attached, and the remote interface looks very nice.

Loads of complicated stuff that I don't yet understand but I reckon it'll be good to start off with just a simple single drive added and copy all my stuff over the network from downstairs to a newly created UFS volume (ZFS seems to be the new thing, but it's a power user thing and requires 8Gb RAM!). After a couple of hours copying over to a newly formatted UFS I'm thinking of putting in the downstairs drive and reformatting it to UFS and creating a RAID-1 mirror. I've got another drive coming off eBay soon.

If it works out I think I can justify getting a Bay Trail setup to the other half. Motherboard + 4Gb RAM + tiny PSU in old chassis shouldn't be much over £100.

There's some talk of UFS becoming redundant on the newer versions of FreeNASso I might have to stick to an older version.

[Zetetic]

Those HP machines look decent enough but higher power consumption than I'm ultimately going for. The one you mentioned, Zetetic, is 150w supply.

They're not very efficient, but they really won't tend to draw at anything like 150W. (With a single drive, I'd be surprised if it peaked much over 90W and idled at anywhere over 50W. I really don't know what I'm talking about though.)

The claimed memory requirements for ZFS under FreeNAS do seem a little bit crazy. I'm vaguely aware that FreeBSD did have some nasty surprises in this area at some point, but I thought things were a bit more sensible now. (I did run a machine with OpenSolaris - mostly out of bloody-mindedness - and that seemed to cope absolutely fine with very little RAM, but admittedly not very big pools.)

[Too Many Cochranes]

From the bits and pieces I've read on the FreeNAS forum it seems that the minimum requirement of 8Gb RAM when using ZFS is because the software automatically does a shit load of caching and indexing of data as soon as system is booted and your drive array is present, even if you're not even accessing any of your stuff.

It then continues to use as much RAM as you've got installed to constantly preen and sort your file system. All well and good if you're running some kind of ten drive array and you need quick and immediate access to lots of data.

It seems a bit overkill for my requirements; to have 8GB of file system constantly primed and cached when I only want to store music and films centrally.

Some of the folks at FreeNAS forums are proper overzealous about data loss too, claiming you need an ECC compatible processor such as a Xeon, with ECC RAM in a server motherboard or YOUR DATA IS CONSTANTLY AT RISK OF LOSS.

I've never owned a Xeon or a stick of ECC RAM and to spend that sort of money on a little media server seems daft.

The spare drive arrived yesterday so I'm planning on using a single drive array in UFS for a week or two just to build up confidence before I put the other one in. Just waiting on the third home plug now, which should hopefully come today. I disconnected the home plug from the Raspberry Pi just for booting/testing purposes the other day.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Update:

I went ahead and bought a Bay Trail setup to stick in the old tower case in the end.

I plumped for the Gigabyte J1800-N-D2H motherboard with 8GB RAM (2x4GB SO-DIMM), so that I could reformat my drives as ZFS, since that seems to give a lot more options and security of data in the latest editions of FreeNAS and UFS is being phased out.

I could've spent extra on the J1900 quad-core motherboard instead of the dual J1800 but figured as a simple file server why would I need more than two threads running, plus the J1800 is clocked about half a GHZ faster anyway which would improve single thread performance.

It works fucking brilliantly. It's a lot more responsive going through the GUI and there's no noticeable lag in loading up an HD film.

I left the ancient rear fan plugged in, since the Bay Trail motherboards are passively cooled and every time I stick my hand round the back of the case to feel if there's warm air coming out it's totally cool, even with the box wedged in the corner of the spare room with not much ambient air wafting round it.

Bay Trail does a great job at silent, cheap computing.