Comments on: Building a NAS Server

By: Phil Veale

Phil Veale — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:29:13 +0000

I've been going through this recently wondering what to use on a NAS project I'm about to start. I have got the hardware already, I'm using a Mini-ITX board with an AMD APU and a chipset that supports 8 SATA ports, it has 7 on the board +1 eSATA. Case is Mini-ITX Lian Li with 7 "Hot Swap" trayless bays.

I'm stuck on the choice of OS. Ubuntu supports ZFS natively now, and that's appealing, but so is a more proven solution such as FreeNAS 8 or NAS4Free. I do also partly question "do I really want ZFS?" - the reason perhaps for not doing it is that the disks may well be quite mixed in size. I can't really imagine a decent ZFS config where you have 2x 500GB disks, 2x 1TB, 2x 1.5TB and a 3TB drive, for example. You're going to end up wasting a lot of space, somewhere.

I contemplated the idea of creating RAID-Zs from vdevs made of 500GB partitions, spread across the disks and then shoving them all into one Zpool but this seems messy and it's suggested the performance takes a hit. This might not play with will FreeNAS/NAS4Free either, and perhaps I'd be better off using OpenIndiana/Nexenta.

Any advice for what to do, given the changed availability of software 2 years after this article was written?

By: tschi

tschi — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:20:42 +0000

Hi, did you configure WOL with freenas and AT3IONT ? I tried with nas4free (freebsd 9.1) and AT3IONT but I can't not able to make wol thx

By: sblair

sblair — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:46:19 +0000

Yes, and it works very well, especially with the remote GUI: http://code.google.com/p/transmisson-remote-gui/

It’s better to move Transmission’s configuration directory to somewhere on your ZFS pool. By default, I think it is stored in memory (assuming you are booting from a USB flash drive), so it’s lost whenever you reboot.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:42:39 +0000

Indeed I do. Thank you for clearing that up. I was looking at the screen shot you posted of the web interface and have been scratching my head. Are you still using Transmission as your BT client? Has it worked out well for your setup?

By: sblair

sblair — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:44:23 +0000

Chris, I use RAID-Z1 (single drive redundancy), so I get a usable space of 5.18 TB. I'm guessing you have a similar setup?

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:18:50 +0000

This was a great write up! I am looking into building my own NAS and gained a lot of insight from your build. I am curious though, you used 4x2TB drives in a ZFS pool and still have over 7TB of total storage. I set up my FreeNAS box using 3x3TB drives in a ZFS pool and was only able to get a bit under 6TB total storage space in the pool. Do you know why that might be?

Thanks!

By: Jared

Jared — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:01:13 +0000

would love to hear the thoughts on building this nas with ubuntu and zfs rather than freenas. Also what sort of changes you might make if you did it today....

By: Dimitris

Dimitris — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 19:29:21 +0000

Great article! Could you plese tell us the HDD models? Where can I find a 2TB hdd for (240/4) 60?

By: Travis Osterman

Travis Osterman — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:45:07 +0000

Great article. I hadn't considered zfs for a filesystem/layer solution but am considering an upgrade to my home server that has been chugging along with gentoo linux for seven years. A while back I was looking for a reason to dabble in bsd - you may have given it to me.

By: sblair

sblair — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 03:25:16 +0000

@Nnyan You would have two vdevs: the original ~18TB vdev (with RAID-Z2) and the new vdev (using 2 * 3TB drives, in some configuration). Both could be added to the same pool, at any time. But failure of the new vdev -- e.g., if the new vdev was aggregated (non-redundantly) and there was a failure of either of the new 3TB drives -- would kill the entire pool. But, the users would see their storage pool magically increase by ~6TB, so it's a trade-off.