The WesMorgan

 hardware  No Responses »
Feb 142010
 

Wes Morgan suggested this:

  1. Athena Power CA-SWH01BH8 Pedestal case $270
  2. Antec CP-850 850W PSU $109
  3. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
  4. Intel S3200SHV LGA 775 Intel 3200 m/b $200
  5. Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 CPU $190
  6. SATA cables $60
  7. Supermicro LSI MegaRAID 8 Port SAS RAID Controller $118
  8. Kingston ValueRAM 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ECC $97

Total price with shipping $1100 roughly.

And like Wes says, $400 less than the Supermicro.

I also like the above with this Supermicro case:

  1. SUPERMICRO CSE-743T-645B Black 4U Pedestal Chassis w/ 645W Power Supply $320
  2. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
  3. Intel S3200SHV LGA 775 Intel 3200 m/b $200
  4. Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 CPU $190
  5. SATA cables $60
  6. Supermicro LSI MegaRAID 8 Port SAS RAID Controller $118
  7. Kingston ValueRAM 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ECC $97

Total price with shipping, roughly $1,040. The main difference, you get a Supermicro case with a PSU.

Another interesting SATA card is the SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II 4 port card for $60.

Moses/Amertrash also has this SAS3042e (pdf) which contains the LSISAS1064 chipset and can support up to four SATA devices. It is, more or less, this card from Newegg.

Supermicro

 hardware  1 Response »
Feb 142010
 

I am redoing the previous Supermicro quote to reflect some recent decisions. Specifically, changing to LSI from RocketRaid.

  1. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
  2. SuperMicro 5046A $750 (+$43 shipping)
  3. LSI SAS 3081E-R $235
  4. SATA cables $60
  5. Crucial 3x2G ECC DDR3-1333 $191 (+ $6 shipping)
  6. Xeon W3520 $310

Total price with shipping $1560

I also found that LSI card on google.

And cheaper cables.

Pricing the Athena

 hardware  2 Responses »
Feb 142010
 

Let’s price out the Athena now:

  1. Athena Power CA-SWH01BH8 Pedestal case $270
  2. Antec CP-850 850W $20
  3. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20
  4. Intel S3420GPLC LGA 1156 Intel 3420 ATX Intel Xeon $205
  5. Intel Xeon X3430 Lynnfield 2.4GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Server Processor Model BX80605X3430 $210
  6. Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 ECC Registered Server Memory Model KVR1333D3D4R9SK2/8G $287
  7. LSI SAS 3081E-R $235
  8. SATA cables $60
  9. VisionTek VTK Rad7K 64P Radeon 7000 64MB $35

The motherboard has 6 onboard SATA ports, all supported in FreeBSD.

Total price, with shipping: $1,460

This is competitive with other recently systems priced but has more SATA ports overall. If paying this, why not buy the SuperMicro?

See also this FreeBSD 8, AMD64, ZFS Storage server thread.

How many SATA ports?

 hardware  No Responses »
Feb 132010
 

For some reason, I want my future file server to have space for 8 hot-swap HDD. Those HDD will house the RAIDZ cluster of my ZFS array (although that particular terminology sounds odd). Why do I want hot-swap? Because I can. It costs about $100 for a drive cage for 4 SATA drives. That’s +$25 per HDD, but it’s nice. That’s all. It’s Nice To Have.

I said RAIDZ, but I might go with raidz2, or perhaps raidz3. They can withstand 2 or 3 simultaneous disk failures. The different levels require a different minimum number of disks. ZFS clusters are recommended to contain between 2 and 9 HDD. If you need more than 9 HDD, create a new cluster.

  • raidz – 3 HDD minimum
  • raidz2 – 5 HDD miniumum
  • raidz3 – 8 HDD minimum

Taken from ZFS Best Practices Guide.

The following table shows how much disk space I would have in each arrangement of parity, disk size,and disk quantity.

  Disk size (TB)
  1 1.5 2
Num Disks Parity Space Available
3 1 2 3 4
4 1 3 4.5 6
5 1 4 6 8
5 2 3 4.5 6
6 1 5 7.5 10
6 2 4 6 8
7 1 6 9 12
8 1 7 10.5 14
8 2 6 9 12
8 3 5 7.5 10

The plan is to start with four HDD, so at most, I can get raidz. Which would give me 6TB of space with 2TB HDD.

I’ve also been thinking about how many SATA ports should my motherboard have. Six is pretty common. But I also plan to have a DVD drive. I also plan to boot off a non-ZFS array. That will require two SATA ports, because I will use gmirror on that.

This means I need 3 SATA ports for the system, plus one per each HDD in the array, for a total of 11 ports, if I go with an 8-HDD ZFS array.

Why no Drobo? Or SmartStor?

 hardware  No Responses »
Feb 112010
 

People have asked me why I’m creating what amounts to a NAS. Why don’t I use Drobo or SmartStor for example?

The above don’t have ZFS, which is the best solution for redundant storage.

I can’t install Bacula on those systems. Sure, Bacula could run on another system and access that storage, but being directly on the system has advantages.

Or why don’t you use FreeNAS for example? You’d be running FreeBSD!

FreeNAS, to my knowledge, doesn’t come with gcc, a vital component for building and install ports. To fit into constrained hardware, they supply a stripped down version of FreeBSD. I’ll be interested to see FreeNAS 8, which will have ZFS support and FreeBSD 8.x, which will be a big plus!

Cost isn’t the reason for not using those products.

The Drobo unit I’d need is $1400. Which is pretty much identical to the cost of the Supermicro system I describe in an earlier post.

That said, I could built a much cheaper system and get more functionality than Drobo.

I think Drobo is a great product. It looks great, and I’ve heard many people using it.

It’s not quite what I need.

What about an HP ML150?

 hardware  No Responses »
Feb 112010
 

Let’s look at this combination:

  1. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
  2. HP ProLiant ML150 G6 E5506 $850(+$43 shipping)
  3. RocketRAID 2300 PCIe 4x SATA $120 (+$8 shipping)
  4. Crucial 3x2G ECC DDR3-1333 $191 (+ $6 shipping)

Total price in cart: $1178.97 + $42.90 shipping = $1,221.87

So the premium for the Supermicro is about $220.

Is the hotswap worth the $220?

Oh, and the Supermicro will need a video card: VisionTek VTK Rad7K 64P Radeon 7000 64MB for $35. So really, it is a $250 premium for hot swap.

What HDD?

 hardware  1 Response »
Feb 112010
 

For the file server, perhaps one of these three combinations:

  1. Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 4@$300 – $1200 8TB or $150/TB
  2. SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ 4@$150 – $600 4TB or $150/TB
  3. Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ 4@$160 – $640 or $160/TB

Also in this system would be a gmirrored pair of HDD for the base OS. I’d rather run the system off non-ZFS for now. I have two such drives at home (amongst others).

I’m also considering adding a small SSD for L2ARC:

  1. OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30GXXX 2.5″ 30GB SATA II MLC $135
  2. Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5″ 40GB SATA II MLC $130

Perhaps this video card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129042

And perhaps I’ll get 12GB of RAM.

Also considering this HP box: HP ProLiant ML150

Other random products:

  1. LSI SAS3041E-R Storage controller (RAID)- Serial ATA-300 / SAS- 300 MBps
  2. SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI Express SATA II Controller Card
  3. ASUS Model PCIE GEN2 SATA6G Expansion Card
  4. SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card

The File Server (more detail)

 hardware  3 Responses »
Feb 112010
 

Following on from my previous post on my file server, here is what
I’m now looking at. It’s based upon various discussions on mailing lists and IRC channels.

  1. Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
  2. SuperMicro 5046A $750 (+$43 shipping)
  3. RocketRAID 2300 PCIe 4x SATA $120 (+$8 shipping)
  4. Crucial 3x2G ECC DDR3-1333 $191 (+ $6 shipping)
  5. Xeon W3520 $310

Total price in cart: $1389.95 + $52.95 shipping = $1441.90

Not included: HDD, which will be my next task.

The File Server

 hardware  No Responses »
Feb 102010
 

This is the current thinking for my soon-to-be-built storage server.

I should consult freebsd-hardware first.

Oh, and I’ve been thinking of using FreeNAS.

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