April, 1st 2010
Update: Booted from the FreeNAS embed USB image (0.71.5094 nightly build). I only have 2 drives in the box due to the lack of a PCI riser card for my SATA controller. I made a RAIDZ1 ZFS pool (pretty much a mirror right now since it’s only 2 drives, exactly what the Drobo would have done) of 1.5TB. Throughput when transferring files via Samba is 50-70Mb/s Read, and 25 – 40 Mb/s Write. That is pretty impressive for an Atom based NAS, and I suspect the speeds will be even better once I have NFS to replace Samba. I will be experimenting with various other OSs to compare performance and features. So far I have unRAID, plain OpenSolaris and Nexenta; all of them offer similar features to the Drobo – one drive fault tolerance, expansion of array and some self-healing features. Stay tuned.
March, 31st 2010
First of all, thank you to those who tweeted and replied to my original post about DIYing a NAS! I hope I’ve answered most of your questions and concerns.
My parts just arrived a couple of days ago… however the store did not include a PCI riser card for my SATA controller. Big FaIL to NCIX
In case NCIX cannot send me replacement soon, I’v ordered a PCI Riser on eBay (was only $1.5 shipped from Hong Kong) along with a 4GB SSD in which the OS will run on. These parts will take another week or so to ship.
In the meantime, my plan is to install FreeNAS on a USB stick and create a ZFS pool of two of my drives.
I will post some pictures soon, and please do come back to this post for more updates.
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