Hi guys, am thinking of making up my own NAS drive in order to save a few quid. FreeNAS seems to be the software to use, my question is, is an intel Atom powerful enough to run a decent NAS drive? I really am not up to speed with the various Atom processors. I understand FreeNAS can also have compatibility issues hardware, is this the case? Cheers for the help!
Atom is fine for nas duty. Should be perfectly good for low concurrent user number home use. FreeNAS is based on BSD which is way slower with supporting new hardware, but Atom stuff has been out a long time now. It's not likely to be an issue as long as you don't get a motherboard with an uncommon network interface or something like that. There are also other nas distro like openfiler and what not in case you did.
I was thinking the same but others pointed me towards OpenMediaVault - it's effectively the same thing but without the hardware compatibility issues. It doesn't support ZFS, so it's not for you if you were desperate for that but otherwise it's pretty decent
Thanks for the info guys. The OpenMediaVault does look pretty good, plus it's based on Debian which I have been playing around with on the Raspberry Pi recently. What are the benefits of ZFS? I just assumed it was a software raid. I assume with OpenMediaVault you just use the hardware raid. Does the OpenMediaVault have a DLNA/UPNP plugin for it? Is the main OS updated often too? Thanks again!
ZFS is software RAID, but the pool info is held on disk - I have an atom FreeNAS setup - the OS, one drive, and the motherboard can break and I can still transplant the rest of the drives into another (different hardware'd) machine and get all my data.
That is interesting info to know. What kind of speeds to you get with FreeNAS and the Atom? As I understand it, ZFS requires more power and memory. Also, I'm having real trouble finding Atom boards at the moment. Even SCAN only has 4, 3 on pre-order, 1 with only 4GB memory support.
ZFS is a file system, just like UFS, NTFS, and ext4. It has some interesting features such as copy-on-write, snapshots and real-time data verification. It has the concept of storage pools, which Wikipedia probably explains better than I would: This all comes with the cost of higher resource requirements. It boils down to whether you want these features and whether you want to learn to use ZFS. What?
You could look into AMD E350 / E450s - I'm not sure how they compare price-wise but are equally up to NAS duties. Alternatively, unless you're dead-set on another solution, you could look into the HP Microserver I read once (possibly on FreeNAS' website) that for ZFS you really need 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage space for it to run as well as it could.
Good call on this one, little more expensive but this seems like a good one. Passive cooling too. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-499-AS&groupid=701&catid=1903&subcat=2230 and for a case this seems ok, http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-006-FD&groupid=2362&catid=1556&subcat= I did spot the microserver in your sig and did look at them. Any one you would particularly recommend? Yep, I read the same. Sadly, most ITX size motherboards only support 8GB max.
Apologies, just realised my server is AMD based (It's an HP Microserver) rather than an atom! I get about 80mb/s out of it though.
