Re: Home NAS

The message <moadnYFPwYnuDf7XnZ2dnUVZ8iOdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Jeff <Jeff@xxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Chaps,

Looking at getting a home NAS to act as shared backup / storage for a
few machines.
Budget up to around 150 quid for 500 gig.

Priorities:
Silence (or close to) - reliability - speed.

Looked at a few models from Freecom and Buffalo but for every glowing
review there's a gripe about slow transfers or freezing.

Anyone got any personal recommendations?

Cheers

Jeff

If you're up for rolling your own NAS box, take a look at FreeNAS (I'm
sure you know how to use a search engine ;-). You can quite easily
convert a suitably quiet PC into a high performance NAS box much cheaper
than the ready made units would cost you.

I've converted an old Gateway 2000 desktop box into an almost silent
4TB server (4 x Samsung HD103UJ drives spinning at a standard 7,200
rpm!). When I say almost silent, I mean I have to shut down my very
quiet win2k box and crouch down to place my head close to it in order to
detect what tiny amount of noise it does make.

Here's a copy and paste from one of my replies to a thread that was
running 5 months ago in this NG (sorry, I can't recall the title of the
thread), which I think should make an interesting read.

Start Quote:
=================================================================
The message <gmjkd0$8af$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

In article <6v45ggFi6gfiU5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Stumbles <john.stumbles@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I keep thinking of sticking a large HDD or two into a smallish
low-powered base unit running NFS, rsync backups and apache (for
intranet) and putting it in the server room (aka cupboard under the stairs
:-)). However a quick trawl through dabs, ebuyer and novatech reveals a
complete lack of cheap PCs of any kind: nothing much under £200, whereas
a year or two back you used to be able to get a basic machine with a
Linux distro for about £160. Any pointers?

If you're up for building your own...

Cheapest low power general purpose mobo right now is probably an Intel
Atom, however the VIA boards are lower power (but slower, not an issue
for what you need)

Atom mobo:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12195

VIA Motherboard:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11662

Although that's out of stock, but due soon, and there are other VIA
motherboards there too.

Add in a suitable case, 2 WD Green drives and off you go. My home
server/firewall/backup thing has an Atom mobo, and 2 WDC Green 1TB drives
in it and it sucks about 45 watts. If I'd used a VIA board it would be
about 10W less, but I wanted the Atom for other reasons.

One advantage of the VIA boards is lack of fan, the Atom boards have
a weeny whiney little fan on them and the one in my workstation is
driving me nuts and an investigation might just be undertaken to see
if it can be slowed down or even removed/replaced... (it's not on the
processor but the bridge chip!)

That's interesting, I'm running a FreeNAS box with four Samsung HD103UJ
disks mounted and this takes just 54 to 55 watts (depending on drive
temperature - I don't spin them down). This box is, as near as damnit,
totally silent despite the low level of 120Hz spindle vibration which,
in the typical 'tin box' can be magnified to a level of annoyance out of
all proportion, especially if resting on a desktop surface that has
sounding board resonance modes around this frequency.

With each drive accounting for about 8 watts each in the power budget
when spinning, this leaves the remaining 22 or so watts accounted for by
the Asrock AliveNF7G-FULLHD R3.0 and an underclocked 1250 AMD Semperon
running at 800MHz with the core voltage dropped to 0.850 volts. I have a
single stick of 1GB DDR2 memory fitted (the benefit of dual channel is
rather lost in this application, as I proved by trying it with a couple
of 1GB dimms).

Mind you, the original[1] 145 watt mini ATX psu fitted in this
Gateway2000 desktop case does contribute a good 5 to 10 watts
improvement over the typical standard 3 to 4 hundred watt ATX psu
designs generally available.

The Gateway case is especially good for this job since it is quite
sturdily made and had space to fit the extra two drives, using MoBo
stand off pillars, just behind the front panel where they could get
first sniff of the incoming air to keep them nice and cool (too cool as
it turns out) without the need to supplement the extremely quiet airflow
generated by the lone PSU fan.

For file serving / print serving, you need very little processor power,
so you can safely underclock to the minimum speed possible (but be wary
of departing from standard minimum FSB clocks though since this could
effect I/O performance - HDD and Gbit ethernet).

The normal multiplier setting on the Sempron is 11 (afaicr) which, on
the "200 MHz" FSB, clocks it at 2.2GHz. I originally tried the minimum
of 4 with a 150MHz FSB setting (600MHz) but found this was knocking the
data transfer rate down by a good 10% or more, so I reset the FSB back
to its normal setting of "200 MHz", raising the CPU clock to 800 MHz.

The penalty in power consumption was less than a watt, even after
raising the Vcore from its minimum setting of 0.800v up to 0.850v, so it
seemed a worthwhile compromise to regain full I/O performance. TBH. I
was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that such control over the
CPU multiplier setting was even possible (Hats off to AMD for
re-instating this feature!).

Mind you, all this undervolting (especially the undervolting) and
multiplier and FSB adjustments were only made possible by the cmos
configuration including them in the setup menu.

An awful lot of MoBo bioses have *** cmos configuration menus that
limit such options, especially the Vcore one where it is arrogantly
assumed that only overclockers will be tuning the system so only
increases of voltage over and above whatever the cpu default happens to
be are offered. Unfortunately, this often only becomes apparent after
you've set it up and booted into the cmos setup.

When I was choosing a processor and MoBo combination for the NAS
upgrade, I was looking for the cheapest combo that offered a minimum of
4 sata ports with built in Gb ethernet port and took 'pot luck' over the
cmos options. I guess I was lucky, but the dynamic Vcore power saving
option with this generation of CPU is probably what guaranteed the
availability of a full range of Vcore settings in the cmos setup.

The Intel CPU route might not offer the same multiplier control (I'm
not sure if Intel have also seen the light and restored this as an end
user option) so I can't say whether such might be a better choice.
However, if you can find on-line reviews or detail specs that list the
cmos options for your prospective purchase, you should be able to avoid
the less suitable examples.

The power savings of an especially low power motherboard and processor
might not be necessary unless you're only fitting one or two drives and
planning on subjecting them to the stress of spindown power saving in
which case, a 5 or 10 watt reduction on a base consumption of 15 to 20
watts would represent a sizeable reduction percentage-wise.

Once you go for an instant response 4 drive setup, the marginal power
saving between an especially low power consumption MoBo and an
undervolted, underclocked mainstream one becomes much less important.

If I placed more value on the saving of some 30 odd quid a year on the
electricity bill over the integrity of and instant access to my data, I
could employ spindown power saving to the tune of some 30 watts. Since I
don't, that extra 5 or 10 watts used by my choice of MoBo over a
specialised low power one, becomes of little significance.

The choice of PSU becomes more significant once we're considering
system power levels around the 50 watt or less mark since a cheap
commodity unit could well account for an extra 10 watts over and above
what a modestly sized high efficiency unit could achieve. I didn't shop
around for such, since it just so happened that the original 145 watt
unit in the Gateway 2000 desktop style case that I decided to use as a
replacement for the NEC Powermate II box I had been previously using
just happened to be noticably less power hungry than the typical 300/400
watt ATX psu.

If you're looking to putting a cost effective 3 or 4 disk NAS box or
fileserver together, I could recommend you look out for a Gateway 2000
desktop (not tower) case for its solidity and efficient PSU but beware
of a possible issue with this PSU and certain MoBos as detailed in
note[1]. I can also recommend that Asrock AliveNF7G-FULLHD R3.0 and the
1250 AMD Semperon I'm currently using (and Samsung HD103UJ drives as
well ;-)

The only other snag with this Gateway case is that the I/O shield area
isn't the standard letterbox cutout, the i/o holes have been directly
punched out of the rear panel to accomodate the original MoBo.

You'll either have to hack out the existing holes or create a standard
I/O shield letterbox aperture to accomodate a standard shield plate to
allow a replacement MoBo to be installed. Not a showstopper, just a
trivial impediment to upgrading the MoBo for someone prepared, if needs
be, to spend a fiver in Aldi on a pair of 'Tinsnips' ;-)

[1] Mind you, it's not quite so original now. When I upgraded from an
Asrock micro ATX P4 MoBo, which would allow the CPU vrm to be powered
off the 5 volt rail in the absence of a 4 pin 12 volt connector, to the
current AM2 socket one which has (rather unconscionably) no such option,
I had to wire a 4 pin 12v connector into the PSU on account it lacked
this refinement.

I also had to add the guts of a cheap 5.2v 1.2A smpsu wallwart to beef
up the surprisingly low powered 5VSB rail (just 100mA rated!!!) which
wasn't anywhere near enough to allow the new board to fire up.

It was no wonder I had startup issues with some of the previous MoBos
I'd tried on previous occasions. I guess I hadn't looked quite so
closely at the voltage ratings to spot that it wasn't even a mere one
(or even half!) amp rating. One wouldn't normally bother trying to
modify the innards of a PSU, but, in this case, it was deemed well worth
the trouble to hang on to the quietness and high efficiency of the
original.

I do have a 270 watt micro ATX PSU of the type intended for those SFF
cases which I could have fitted with very little modification to the
case, but, although its efficiency was noticably better than the usual
commodity ATX units, it wasn't quite as good as the original (but I keep
it in the "Server Spares" box just in case the original finally pops its
clogs and heads off for 'Silicon Heaven'(tm Red Dwarf) ;-)

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

================================================================
End Quote:

I've changed some of the settings since then. Firstly, since it seems
to be quite a trick to getting a reasonable speed out of Gbit ethernet
(you've only got to look at the test figures for some of those not so
very cheap SoHo ready made NAS boxes that _are_ equipped with GBit
ethernet to see that), I've raised the CPU clock speed a little bit
more. AFAICR (the latest version of FreeNAS no longer reports the actual
clock speed in the system status page) I've got it set to 1.2GHz (200MHz
FSB with 6x multiplier and, iirc, the Vcore set to 1.00v). This has
increased the power consumption by about a watt or two (I think it now
takes 56 to 57 watts).

I've also added a second dimm, taking it to 2GB of ram, mainly to get
the benefit of dual channel working. The extra dimm hardly seems to
effect power consumption, perhaps an extra half watt.

I've now been running version 0.7RC1 since the 23rd of June (just 3
days after its release). The update definitely improved over the wire
data transfer speeds in spite of it still not applying the jumbo frame
setting (you can set it to 7000 or whatever alternative jumbo frame you
like but the network status page still stubbornly reports it as 1500).

Whereas I was struggling to get write speeds up to 20MB/s about six
months ago (comfortably above my primary speed target of a GB per
minute), I now see write speeds (large GB sized media files) of 30 to
33MB/s and read speeds of around 35MB/s (which, during testing, reached
44MB/s when the source file was small enough to fit into the server's
cache).

My write transfer speeds are very nearly 2GB per minute (somewhere
close to 110GB an hour). Obviously, this all relies upon having a Gbit
network and Gbit capable client PCs. On a 100Mbps network, expect to
only see 10MB/s at best (more typically, 7 to 9 MB/s)

If you can lay your hands on a suitable case and PSU you should be able
to get a suitable MoBo, CPU with heatsink, a GB of DDR2 ram and one of
those WD Green Terabyte drives for around your £150 budget.

HTH

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.