I have this AMD 4850e/4GB non-ECC RAM/2,6TB/WS2008 serving files and other needs around the apartment. No RAID, no formal backups etc. Some of the more important stuff is on couple of disks and in the cloud etc.
At first I intented to buy only 2 more hard drives, adding maybe 2-3TB. Then I got this idea wouldn’t it be fun to do away with all the separate disks and handle all the storage as one pool. This lead me to ZFS and this wonderful write-up about it.
Hardware choices
While I haven’t bought anything except sil3124-based sata raid card and couple of Dell raid cards($27 for the 2, surprised it they work), but this is how the escalation has gone so far:
- Buy 4 1,5TB drives to use in RAIDZ configuration added to the existing server
- Upgrade desktop to Intel Core i5-750 and use the E6600/4GB for the fileserver
- Get Xeon/server mobo/4GB ECC RAM and a huge case for the fileserver
I’m basing the current choice on the positive idea that if I don’t need the fileserver to be that beefy I can use it as a desktop. It’ll be interesting to see whether Intel Lynnfield Xeon with power management uses less power than the AMD 4850e. Tested the current server with OpenSolaris livecd and it idles at 100W, compared to idling at 50W when using WS2008.
Hard disk choices
There is no perfect choice for home use if you intend to use any sort of RAID. This is because of TLER. Good discussion of it found at OpenSolaris forums.
1,5TB is currently the sweet spot price-wise as you can get Samsung or Western Digital drive for roughly €85-90 from various German online shops. However these drives aren’t rated for RAID use and in error situations can become unresponsive which in turn can result in them getting dropped from RAID ARRAY. Pretty much all the drives rated for RAID operation cost roughly 30-50% more. That is a huge premium in my case because I would pay for the extra performance that I wouldn’t need.
This basically means that I’m propably going to try my luck with the consumer class drives as the cost is an issue. 6 1,5TB drives cost roughly €520 compared to 8 1TB RAID drives that cost €800 for the same storage space. Getting to 6TB usable with RAIDZ2 would cost in excess of €1100 with Western Digital RE4 2TB drives. It would be pretty much cheaper operation to just get two sets of 1,5TB drives and mirror them. Except for the power usage and likely also noise.
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