Much ado about NAS things
Well, I posted a while ago about the disaster that is the Netgear ReadyNAS, but I never did post what I finally did! Torn between running a full linux distro and using the various options to share the stuff up, which is tempting but has limits, I decided to go a slightly different course - and instead we built a SuperMicro 1U server (the chassis with motherboard is about $650 on NewEgg) and then add into that four Seagate 1gb disks, a PCI-X adaptec raid controller for SATA disks, and finally, a processor and 2gb of ram. The end result - about $1350 out of pocket, and I've got a fully RAID-5 1U pizza-box server with two gigbit nics, 2gb of ram, and best of all - I installed FreeNAS.
FreeNAS is a BSD variant linux distro that turns any machine into a full blown Network Attached Storage device for your network, and even though it had troubles with the full 2gb of ram (only for installing, works great after installed) and after discovering that it can't handle a single disk partition of any kind larger than 1TB, I did manage to get my setup fully configured and operational - and boy, what a setup. These suckers are fast, work great, store tons of stuff - and best of all, FreeNAS does just about anything you'd need for network-based disk storage - including iSCSI. FreeNAS is great if you need network based storage, and have a machine laying around that has plenty of disk drives. The folks that wrote it need to realize that it needs tuning for larger partitions and such, but perhaps someone will make an Ubuntu-based version instead.
My original design with the SuperMicro chassis was cheaper when I left out the RAID controller - the system came with a built-in Intel ICH7 RAID, and BSD did see it, but there's this one problem - the ICH7 under FreeNAS doesn't know how to handle a disk failure at all - so one disk dies in your raid-5, and you're done. RAID-1 doesn't work in that setup either, so you're either going to run in non-raid with your disks (which works fine) or go RAID-5. Note that with RAID-5, we were able to download files at near-wire speeds with only the speed of the RAID array being the evident bottleneck. The adaptec controller does the trick, but it takes some showhorns to get it all into that 1U case - specifically, the SATA cables that come with the system can't be used and need to be replaced - and those have low-profile connectors on one side, and that makes things difficult. We ended up moving one of the fans in the chassis to get things working, but I'd advise getting some long SATA cables with low-profile ends (right angles) if possible.
FreeNAS is a BSD variant linux distro that turns any machine into a full blown Network Attached Storage device for your network, and even though it had troubles with the full 2gb of ram (only for installing, works great after installed) and after discovering that it can't handle a single disk partition of any kind larger than 1TB, I did manage to get my setup fully configured and operational - and boy, what a setup. These suckers are fast, work great, store tons of stuff - and best of all, FreeNAS does just about anything you'd need for network-based disk storage - including iSCSI. FreeNAS is great if you need network based storage, and have a machine laying around that has plenty of disk drives. The folks that wrote it need to realize that it needs tuning for larger partitions and such, but perhaps someone will make an Ubuntu-based version instead.
My original design with the SuperMicro chassis was cheaper when I left out the RAID controller - the system came with a built-in Intel ICH7 RAID, and BSD did see it, but there's this one problem - the ICH7 under FreeNAS doesn't know how to handle a disk failure at all - so one disk dies in your raid-5, and you're done. RAID-1 doesn't work in that setup either, so you're either going to run in non-raid with your disks (which works fine) or go RAID-5. Note that with RAID-5, we were able to download files at near-wire speeds with only the speed of the RAID array being the evident bottleneck. The adaptec controller does the trick, but it takes some showhorns to get it all into that 1U case - specifically, the SATA cables that come with the system can't be used and need to be replaced - and those have low-profile connectors on one side, and that makes things difficult. We ended up moving one of the fans in the chassis to get things working, but I'd advise getting some long SATA cables with low-profile ends (right angles) if possible.
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