Home NAS/server questions

[Andi64]

Thanks for the input - I did look at OpenNAS etc, however my question re BSD was more on a cost/benefit front of using Debian-BSD or Debian-Linux, given that from my reading

• ZFS on BSD is more up-to-date, being a native implementation, than ZFS-on-Linux
• BSD generally offers fairly good device support, but less so than Linux
• Debian-BSD is supposedly slower than Debian-Linux, apparently suffering most in the areas of data throughput

On a related note, I have learnt that the Intel 530 series I was originally proposing to use does not have power loss data protection (ie supercap or similar to ensure writes are committed on power loss), despite the 320-series it replaces having such. Have therefore specced up to a 730, which is a pain as the lowest capacity I can find them available in is 240GB. Still, I can use it for ZIL/L2ARC if I end up running ZFS.

I don't know if it meets all your needs, but FreeNAS is an excellent option. I have a modest FreeNAS server, with 4x1TB WD Blue HDDs, 8GB RAM and a Pentium G2030. I have a CIFS share, with most of the space used for it, and a 500GB Datastore for my Virtual Machines (Media Center, VoIP, VPN, AD, Mail, SQL, and 6 virtualized ESXi).

Performance wise, it's excellent. On Windows I have ~900Mbps bandwidth, with 1 gigabit uplink. My 2 ESXi servers are connected with 2x1gbps uplinks with iSCSI, and read/write performance is up to 200MB/s.

But, if you seek performance, you should use at least 8GB RAM, and I would recommend 16GB or more if possible. SSD for ZIL and L2ARC is useless unless you know what you are doing. First of all, for a ZIL log you'd need 2 SSD in RAID1, and only the sync writes will see a boost in performance. CIFS, AFP or iSCSI (Windows client) won't see any performance benefit 'cause they don't write in sync.

L2ARC does not needs to be RAIDed, you could use a single SSD for that. It acts as a read cache, and it'll be recreated each time the NAS boots. It'll use it only when you run out of RAM.

Instead of throwing SSDs for more performance, which won't happen because of the way it works (again, unless you have a lot of sync writes and/or you work with more data that could fit in your RAM) I would buy 32GB ECC RAM

Edit: oh, also, for OS just use an 8GB USB pendrive, if you go with FreeNAS or something like that.