This is a project that has been brewing in my head for a while. the time has come when I need a bit more reliable mass storage. Rather than spending money on a fugly NAS box (and almost all of them are fugly!) or spending BIG money on something that looks halfway decent like a LaCie or Drobo, I am planning to build my own. Introducing: Ada (Lovelace), a NAS consisting of FreeNAS running on an Epia C7 mini-ITX platform, driving two 1Tb drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Simple, quiet, cheap, low in power consumption. Well, cheap in theory. God knows how much the Steampunk inspired case will cost me to build... But see the SketchUp below, which is a more refined exploration of the concept of Babbage, the dedicated Folding@Home machine I recently dreamt up. Edit: I did a render in Kerkythea of the (more or less) complete model:
Very simple and elegant. Looks easy to do as well. What is that bit in between the two hard drives, on the layer of acrylic?
That's very elegant Nexxo... I absolutely love the design. I'd buy one! [edit] Did you ever dig deeper into this? I'd be interested to know the real story [/edit]
That's the power LED. It would have the side effect of subtly lighting the drive. I'll let you know how much it costs when I build it. Yeah, basically, tomshardware screwed up on the test design. In order to get a measure of power consumption under load, they made the drives perform a looping task. What they did not factor in was that the SSD drives performed this task much faster and therefore multiple times in the time that a mechanical HDD performed the same task once. Therefore, although they seemed to be using more power, they were also doing a lot more work. In real life however, SSDs would use much less power than an HDD for the same task because it would complete it much more quickly and go back to idling in a low power state.
If you ever get sick of FreeNAS, throw on Debian and you'll even have a more powerfull machine (If you need help with it, I'll be glad to assist )
I think I might in the long run. I am already wondering if it could double as a firewall/Wifi router.
I was going in that direction NAS boxes (at home) are more then suitable as routers, with an enormous flexibility
Hmmm... I could change the four upper pillars to hollow carbon fibre tubes; hide the Wifi aerials in there.
It is. The Pico PSU is a tiny circuit board mounted on top of the 20-pin motherboard plug. This connects to a conventional 60 W external 12V power block. The whole thing should use no more than 30W active, 16W idle, 3W in Sleep.
What epia are you using? My epia-m uses about 30w at full load with no disks so you might find your self with out a lot of head room with a 60w psu with two hard disks.
A Jetway J7F2 1.2Ghz Eden CN700 (got it cheap on eBay, and it can be expanded with three extra LAN ports via a clip-on module). The board takes about 16 W on average. The two HDDs (WD10EACS GreenPower) use 3.8 W each at idle, about 7.6 W each during activity. The only headroom I need is for their initial spin-up (28.1 W each). So I'm looking at a 90 W PSU.
I wonder why that board looks so familiar? Think I've seen a couple in threads in project logs! Good choice. I went to Jetway a while ago and don't miss the EPIA boards at all. Jetway has some cool boards in the J9 series. john
The peak draw of the board could be near double that of the average draw (it is on mine) and at start up the board will probably be under full load, although thats after the disks spins up so 90w should be loads just be careful not to over load those power bricks, it doesn't end well. /thinking out loud We need a *boom* smiley.
Those Pico PSU are nice, but from a quick froogle search very expensive and that doesn't include the external power brick. What consideration have you given about the hardware the host OS will use to boot? I presume a flash drive of some sort to minimise power draw and keep the data off the two larger HDDs. I know FreeNAS can run from a CF card and Debian can be configured for minimal writes.
@Nexxo - Carbon fiber tubes will shield your wifi signal. CF has a neat attribute where it absorbs stuff like that. Probably not the best place to hide your wifi antennas.
We always need a *boom* smiley. What? No eBay love? I can pick one up with a brick for about £40,--. And I already have a brick. You really should know by now that I am an obsessive detail freak. Thanks! D'oh. Ah, well, I have a plan B. How does wood perform?
No boom today, boom tomorrow... there's always a boom tomorrow. extra points for how can tell me source of the quote. Mint, i'm get me one of dose. edit: You tried it yet? How does it compare to a cf and adapter?
