G+_Luke Militello Posted October 9, 2014 Share Posted October 9, 2014 My take on a "FreeNAS", however I used NAS4Free as I wasn't in need of all the bells and whistles. I already have a 64TB storage system. This NAS box was made with all spare parts except for the case, PSU, LCD and CF reader. Again, with NAS4Free being so light, I was able to use an embedded 32-bit VIA 1.8GHz system with 4GB of RAM. It has a CF PCI reader connected to the motherboard via SATA, a 100GB SSD for a read cache which is also connected to the motherboard and 4-2TB HDD's connected to a Promise 4-port SATA controller. I have dedup disabled given the system I have and its function is a local Debian/Ubuntu/Mint repository for all my other systems. I named it Hephaestus; suiting as it provides all the "tools" for my other systems to do their work. :)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted October 14, 2014 Share Posted October 14, 2014 Luke Militello funny, I went NAS4FREE too! Looks like a nice setup, but a weird of warning: If you went ZFS (vs standard RAID) it does seem a bit under spec. I've heard concerns about long-term stability but frankly for me the problem is that you may not be able to get the I/O you'll expect! My first build was a low end CPU & I found that saturated before the gigabit connection did :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Luke Militello Posted October 14, 2014 Author Share Posted October 14, 2014 John Mink, I tweaked some kernel options to correct those long term stability problems. I used to get a kernel panic after a week or so, then made the changes. Since then, the box has been up for over 100 days, no problems. Also, you are probably right about the saturation, however all mine is doing is sync'ing to the repositories and then provides local updates for my other stuff. That being said, the writes are minimal and the 100GB SSD read cache helps because when I run updates on my first device, said packages are pulled into the SSD cache. When updating all my other hosts, they just read the same data and it gets read from the cache. I will say, should I ever encounter a rebuild, I'm sure that will load it up a bit. :)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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