Scrap NAS

Monday, July 8, 2013

More IT (scrap NAS)

More IT going on at my home. Some time ago I experimented with proxmox virtualization (déja vue!) and virtualization clusters. At the time, I built a second AMD E-350 rig, which at some stage was converted into a scrap-NAS for data migration purposes. To do this, I grabbed a 2TB-USB2 storage device which was on sale, salvaged the HDD and dumped the rest. The actual HDD would have been more expensive at the time. I figure the USB3 marketing helped to get a cheap HDD (WD green series).
At some stage, I decided to buy a second 2TB-USB2 storage device, in order to salvage the HDD.
Both disks are now living happily next to one another in the same mITX case, alongside with the E-350 board.
This setup is now my new 4TB scrap-NAS, running FreeNAS w/ZFS (stripe) for increased performance.
In the course of experimentation, I played with noise, energy and compression levels provided by FreeNAS. My preliminary decision was to run at maximum energy saving, minimum noise level and lzb-compression. Although very appealing, zfs-dedup remained dis-engaged, remember, it is a scrap-NAS.