DIY NAS Project

[dcorbe]

Hello!

I've been looking at various off the shelf storage solutions for quite some time. The server based solutions are usually expensive and the consumer solutions don't fit my needs. Thus, I've decided to go it alone and build my own. I'm hoping for a little guidance from the community.

SATA III 6Gbit/sec: I see 2, 4 and 8 port motherboards. I'm assuming multiple drives can be chained to a single port (because for example the write speeds I'm getting off of 5400RPM drives are only about 150Mbit/sec). What's the maximum chain depth per port?

Cases: I'd like to find the smallest case possible that's still large enough to house an external drive bay that will hold at least 16 drives. If it's rack-mountable, even better.

RAID: I don't need hardware RAID as it doesn't need to be ultra fast and I'll be using ZFS pools to manage disk allocation.

Motherboard/CPU/Memory: Nothing fancy needed here. The computer itself needs to be powerful enough to run FreeBSD and support an NFS and a Samba server.

Any other suggestions for proceeding would be helpful.

 

[choucove]

Except for using port multipliers, which I'm completely unfamiliar with, there's no way to "chain" multiple hard drives to a single SATA port. The port throughput may be incredibly high (such as 6 Gbps) but your actual speeds are going to vary depending upon the physical drive that you use. A single 5,400 RPM mechanical drive is going to get 150 Mbps at the absolute best, but on average should fall around 100 Mbps or less. Utilizing RAID arrays can improve throughput capabilities by leveraging several simultaneous drive writes and reads, but that of course depends on many factors include array type, controller, software, etc.

If you're wanting to utilize an external RAID or JBOD enclosure for hard drives, then I'd say find a cheap or simple 1U rackmount server from Supermicro, ASUS, Dell, or HP even. You can even get a barebones kit from Supermicro or ASUS to customize and build to fit your needs, and that's probably going to be the cheapest option. I've found HP quality to be the best option, though it's also going to be more expensive. Even if you're not going to use the hardware RAID functionality, you just buy a hardware RAID PCI-Express card with an external mini-SAS connector, and can connect up to an external RAID or JBOD enclosure to access a greater number of hard drives than the internal server system originally allows for.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859108028

Or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101786

Or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859108043

With

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133044

And

http://www.amazon.com/HP-Smart-Array-Controller-PCI-Express/dp/B001S2PZ5E