Hello,
I am planning on creating a NAS with a spare quad core machine I picked up from a garage sale. I am
planning on installing a hardware raid controller that supports SATA and raid 5/10, running ubuntu
linux 10.10 or 11.04, and managing it all with an installation of FreeNas.
I have a gigabit ethernet switch, and plan to use this to serve media files, facilitate lan parties,
store backups of my systems, and possibly to even use installed windows programs from. The goal is for
it to transfer information speedily, and to that effect: I want the read/write transfer speeds to be
AT LEAST 60MB/sec and hopefully as close to 100MB/sec as can be gotten. The total size I want is no
less than 6 TB, and preferably scalable to at least 12 TB.
Thus, I have 4 questions I would like the learned in the community to answer:
1. Since I'm looking on making this at least 6 TB, I was thinking of running a Raid 5 or Raid 10, and
using 2 TB SATA drives as the storage components in the raid. I would like to know which hardware raid
card you would recommend? I need one that would be able to do rebuilds on the fly as opposed to only
within the RAID BIOS/SETUP. Would you recommend the card be PCI? Or PCIe?
2. Which 2 TB drives would you recommend? I would greatly prefer any 2 TB drives which are as close to
performance of this: Samsung F3 HD103SJ 1 TB, 7200 RPM HDD
3. What speed, and how much RAM should I have in the NAS server machine? Assume i want to transfer
countless small files as well as file sizes up to 4 GB (possibly bigger in the future)
4. How would I test throughput read and write after I have completed the setup?
Any answers to these would be greatly appreciated. Is there anything I have forgotten? A key piece
that maybe I have overlooked?
Also, if anyone has any suggestions on how this might be done BETTER than I have listed, I am more than
willing to entertain it. I am using Ubuntu because I figure I can run it as a server (with no x server
running) and trim the processes down so that it uses as little cpu and memory as possible. This way I
figure it can dedicate it's resources totally to the NAS setup, and it's uptime would in the magnitude
of months, if not years without a reboot.
Well, that's all I got, get back to me if you can.
Thanks!
I am planning on creating a NAS with a spare quad core machine I picked up from a garage sale. I am
planning on installing a hardware raid controller that supports SATA and raid 5/10, running ubuntu
linux 10.10 or 11.04, and managing it all with an installation of FreeNas.
I have a gigabit ethernet switch, and plan to use this to serve media files, facilitate lan parties,
store backups of my systems, and possibly to even use installed windows programs from. The goal is for
it to transfer information speedily, and to that effect: I want the read/write transfer speeds to be
AT LEAST 60MB/sec and hopefully as close to 100MB/sec as can be gotten. The total size I want is no
less than 6 TB, and preferably scalable to at least 12 TB.
Thus, I have 4 questions I would like the learned in the community to answer:
1. Since I'm looking on making this at least 6 TB, I was thinking of running a Raid 5 or Raid 10, and
using 2 TB SATA drives as the storage components in the raid. I would like to know which hardware raid
card you would recommend? I need one that would be able to do rebuilds on the fly as opposed to only
within the RAID BIOS/SETUP. Would you recommend the card be PCI? Or PCIe?
2. Which 2 TB drives would you recommend? I would greatly prefer any 2 TB drives which are as close to
performance of this: Samsung F3 HD103SJ 1 TB, 7200 RPM HDD
3. What speed, and how much RAM should I have in the NAS server machine? Assume i want to transfer
countless small files as well as file sizes up to 4 GB (possibly bigger in the future)
4. How would I test throughput read and write after I have completed the setup?
Any answers to these would be greatly appreciated. Is there anything I have forgotten? A key piece
that maybe I have overlooked?
Also, if anyone has any suggestions on how this might be done BETTER than I have listed, I am more than
willing to entertain it. I am using Ubuntu because I figure I can run it as a server (with no x server
running) and trim the processes down so that it uses as little cpu and memory as possible. This way I
figure it can dedicate it's resources totally to the NAS setup, and it's uptime would in the magnitude
of months, if not years without a reboot.
Well, that's all I got, get back to me if you can.
Thanks!