Hey everyone, Lately I've been thinking of putting together a NAS to consolidate my random external hard drives and to provide for some redundancy in case some of the hard drives go kaput. I'm planning on running Solaris + ZFS in RAIDz2, which eliminates the need for an expensive RAID card. I don't have any experience with Solaris, so it should be an interesting learning experience. Please keep in mind I'm in Canada, so US-based sites like newegg.com don't work for me. Use Purely a file server. Won't be playing any games or doing anything other than serving files to my other computers. Budget Tough one, considering six 1.5TB hard drives will run me about $600 CAD already (after pricematching). Let's say approximately $1,500 CAD. Brand Preference None whatsoever, as long the quality's good, has low power usage, and it's not going to break the bank. Timeframe No real rush for this. At the very earliest I'll buy the parts on December 26 (Boxing Day here in Canada) if prices are good. Old Parts None. I'll be buying all brand new parts for this build. Case Zalman MS1000-HS2 Black Aluminum ATX Tower Case - $207 I'm interested in this case mainly because of the six 3.5" hot swappable bays. At $207, it's on the pricier side, but I think the added convenience makes up for it. Any other suggestions? Case Fans 4 x Noctua NF-P12-1300 120MM Ultra Quiet Cooling Fan - $17 each 2 x Noctua NF-B9-1600 92MM Ultra Quiet Cooling Fan - $19 each The case comes with two 120 mm fans, but I thought I would replace them with the above. Noctua is pricey, but I've had good experiences with them in the past. I'm certainly open to any other recommendations. CPU AMD Athlon II X2 235E Dual Core Energy Efficient Processor - $80 Since it's a file server, I don't need the latest and greatest processor. I believe dual core is enough for my needs, and the fact that it's an energy efficient processor is a bonus! Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 ATX AM2+/AM3 - $84 One of the motherboards on Solaris' hardware compatibility list, has 6 SATA connectors + 1 IDE connector. Anyone else have any recommendations on a motherboard that works with Solaris? RAM Kingston 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 CL5 ECC - $125 More expensive than other 4GB kits, but this is ECC memory which, from what I understand, is always useful in a file server. Video Card ASUS GeForce 9400GT 550MHZ 512MB 800MHZ DDR2 - $55 Cheap video card that's on Solaris' hardware compatibility list. I'm certainly open to suggestions for a cheaper video card too. Power Supply Seasonic M12 II 500W EPS12V 20/24PIN ATX Modular Power Supply - $125 I've heard good things about Seasonic. Will 500W be enough for my needs? Hard Drives 6 x Western Digital WD15EADS Caviar Green 1.5TB - $150 1 x Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB - $62 Six 1.5TB hard drives in RAIDz6 should give me about 6TB of space with two hard drives used for parity. Should be enough to last me a while! The other 160GB hard drive will be used to store the operating system. DVD Drive ASUS 16X DVD-ROM Drive Internal SATA - $26 Cheap DVD drive. Won't be burning DVDs or watching BluRay, so the cheaper the better. From NCIX.com, the price of the above build is about $1,860 including taxes. After pricematching everything, the total after taxes is about $1,460. Again, I'm interested in all thoughts about my proposed build. See any incompatibilities? Areas for improvement? Please let me know!
Bump. Any thoughts, please? Minor change: decided to switch to an IDE DVD drive... I realized I already filled up all of my SATA ports with hard drives. Also, does anyone have any recommendations for consumer level hard drives that work with RAID? I understand the recent batches of WD drives don't let you change the TLER setting.
Looks alright to me, although I doubt you'll need 4GB of RAM ever tbh. Have you checked that motherboard can run ECC RAM? Not much point if it'll be running just as normal. I think you could get away with a much lower-power PSU, but you want reliability and stability really, that'll do fine.
if its purely a file server then as krikkit said you dont need ECC ram and then only 2gb of it - i run a win2008r2 server and it barely uses 2gb RAM, even when running as a file/ftp/print server (and torrent/emule machine). 500w will be fine, check how many sata power connectors it has first though.
Unless it's OEM I'll bet that mobo comes with a couple of adapters, it's not like all the molexes will be used on this build!
yes, but to me at least, using adapters feels messy, plus the build quality of most molex-to-anything adpaters is shite - the pins get pushed back out of the connector.
Thanks for the replies! I did some checking, and the GA-MA770-UD3 does support ECC RAM. My main reason for selecting ECC RAM is for data integrity. This file server will be storing... well, basically everything (hence the two hard drive redundancy). I want to be sure that bit rot won't damage the integrity of any of my files. Also, from what I understand, ZFS greatly benefits from 64 bit processors and large amounts of memory. That's why I think 4GB is needed. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong! I'll definitely take a look to see if the PSU has enough SATA connectors.
im pretty sure that ZFS itself has more than enough error-checking and correcting, plus if you are running TWO drives for parity then ECC becomes even less needed.
the filesystem isn't aware of the content, it will only be able to discover and fix errors while writing to the disk. yet it will gladly store corrupt data (if there are errors caused by memory problems) so i vote for ecc. still zfs is a great choice for this project
Yes, from what I've read, there doesn't appear to be a definitive answer regarding the importance of ECC for ZFS. Given that ECC memory is only slightly more expensive than non-ECC memory, I think it's worth the investment. At the very least, it can't hurt, right?
As i understand it - zfs doesn't need ecc per se. It's just like any other filesystem. If it is told to write corrupt data it will write them. After all it's just ones and zeros and it's not the fs's job to interpret and correct the data. So ecc will definitely not hurt but help.
Good to know. Thanks for clearing that up. I don't suppose you know if using non-enterprise level hard drives will affect ZFS the way it affects hardware RAID? By that, I'm referring to how some drives take longer to respond when encountering a bad sector, which causes the hardware RAID card to drop the drive. Unfortunately, you can't change the TLER setting in new Western Digital drives, which is really too bad. I'd rather not resort to purchasing enterprise level drives, which cost about twice as much.
can i ask what you will be storing on this server which will need so many bells and whistles? it seems pretty OTT if all you wanna do is stream stuff over a network.
Mate, you've got 7 hard drives listed in your opening post - the 6 1.5TB drives, and the 160GB drive. How are you planning to use them with 6 SATA ports?
Sorry, don't know that either. I just remember i had lots of WD disks kicked out of a hardware raid. Changed to seagate and never had a single problem in 4 years. It was an xfs filesystem btw. We never cared too much about enterprise level drives.
The 160GB hard drive is an IDE drive. I'm planning on putting the OS on it. Bells and whistles? It seems fairly standard to me, perhaps except for the 6 hard drives. Problem is, ZFS doesn't let you add a disk to an existing vdev. Instead, you have to create a new vdev with the same number of disks, which means more hard drives will be used for parity instead of being available for storage. To me, it seems like the best choice would be to start off with the max number of hard drives that I'm going to use. Later on, I can upgrade the hard drives one at a time to expand the capacity of the pool. At the moment, 1.5TB (consumer) hard drives have a pretty good $/GB ratio, which is why I chose them. For the other components, I'm using an inexpensive motherboard, low power (but hopefully energy efficient) processor, cheap video card, and a cheap DVD drive. In addition, ECC memory isn't that much more expensive than non-ECC memory and Seasonic power supplies have a good reputation. I do believe in quality over quantity. If I can spend a little more today to prevent a boat load of headaches in the future, then it's money well spent in my opinion. The case is more expensive than I'd like, but I do appreciate the convenience of not having to open up the case to switch out hard drives in the future. Oh, and I've decided to switch to Scythe fans, which are markedly cheaper than Noctua fans. As for what I'm going to be storing, well... basically everything I need. I'm planning on ripping my DVD and Bluray collections to store on the server so any computer in my network can access them. It'll also be a basic file storage for downloads, pictures, home videos, images of hard drives for backup purposes, etc. No worries. Thanks for your help! I'm a little hesitant about using Seagate due to their much-publicized hard drive failure problems recently, but I'll definitely consider them.
Isn't your optical drive IDE too? Might it cause problems when it comes to which drive is the Master/Slave?
I don't think so? Assuming I set the master/slave jumpers properly, I don't think I'll run into any problems...
