ZFS RAID

Lundman's RAID

LRAID5

In the recent years the very small Intel Atom reference boards have become very affordable. For example, the D945GCLF2 has a Dual-Core 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 chip on board. Just needs memory and it is ready to go. Sure it could be even better suited, for example; better SATA controller that supports AHCI, faster than 32bit PCI bus for the extra PCI card.

D945GCLF2

I wanted to build a RAID as cheaply as possible, with already working parts, and minimal fuss. So, Intel Arch for Open Solaris, preferably 64 bit to handle all current and future sized hard disks. Green, as in economical would be good. Fan-less for noise and all those other things.

All prices are in Japan Yen unless otherwise specified.

 7,825 Atom
 5,000 dac-sata-mv8
 2,880 memory
 1,800 usb stick

The memory is actually rated at 800MHz, which is better than the Atom can use, so potentially it can be cheaper, but at such a small cost it does not seem relevant.

I picked the Supermicro MV8 card on auction. It is the older SATA-1 card. For just a little more, the AOC-SAT2-MV8 is probably just as good. I don't know if SATA-2 will give you any speed increase on the 32 bit PCI bus over all. But we will get numbers from both cards soon. If you want to get your own card, remember it has to be supported by OpenSolaris, and hot-swappable.

sata_card research

DAC-SATA-MV8

Currently, I am looking at a small Mini-ITX case. I don't want something that looks like a PC. I want something that looks like a RAID/NAS. One option is the case called "QBox-4" at servercase.com, also used in Addonics Storage Tower, IOI NAS etc etc. It is actually made by Chyangfun. I have contacted them for buying a case, price and shipping. I have yet to receive it, so I do not know if it will work out.

It was very hard to find the manufacturer of the case, lots of effort here :)

CGN-S40X case: $100US (10,000).

S40X Case

I have already picked up the picoLCD. Ported the drivers to Solaris and confirmed that it works. I will need to work out what to display though. Everyone who knows me know how terrible I am at designing GUIs though.

picoLCD: 8,400.

picoLCD design ideas here.

The final piece of the puzzle is the 5-in-3 mobile rack. There are quite a few options available out there, most of them are indeed the same. There is one model that should be mentioned, as it has USB ports exported as well. Which I guess would be neat to allow users to attach whatever random storage to copy to the NAS, but that would add extra complications for the support as well. At the moment I am looking mostly at the length of the unit (size it will take inside the Mini-ITX case toward the PSU, for heating and other considerations).

5in3 research

Image gallery is available.

If I were to guess the costs for the final product:

 7,825 Atom
 5,000 dac-sata-mv8
 2,880 memory
 1,800 usb stick
10,000 case
 8,400 LCD
11,400 5in3
------
47,305 total.

Much more than I really had in mind. Possibly it can be made cheaper with bulk buy, registering as a company and all that. I purchased everything as a regular person using online shopping. It is getting close to commercial RAID/NAS prices (cheapest 5 HDD raid is around 90,000 or so) which is sad, at least they do not do native ZFS support yet.