Re: Building a low-power FreeBSD media server

Josh schrieb:
I'm planning on building a home file server for serving media files
across my home network. I want it to be easily expandable, and am
planning on using FreeBSD and ZFS to accomplish this. This question is
really more about hardware. Because the server will be running 24/7,
and because it won't be doing anything particularly intensive, I want
it to be as low power as possible. An obvious starting point,
therefore is a VIA powered mini ITX board. Since it's just a file
server, all I should need besides that is a bunch of hard drives, and
a case to hold everything. This is what I've come up with so far, but
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any criticisms/suggestions:

The JetWay J7F5M1G2E-VHE-LF motherboard (VIA C7) will give me a low
power processor, gigabit ethernet, two SATA ports, 1 PATA port, and a
PCI expansion slot which will allow me to add 4 more SATA ports. So
for about $350 plus the cost of a case, power supply, HDDs, and RAM, I
should be able to put together a pretty low power file server with
upwards of 6 TB of raw storage. The only real issue remaining is
finding a case that's big enough to hold 6 HDDs (maybe 7 if I decide
to use that PATA port for the system drive) and has the mountings for
a mini ITX mobo.

Does anyone see any problems or room for improvement with this plan?


I have no direct experience with FreeBSD and ZFS, but from various reports on the mailing-lists, it would seem that
a) it likes to run on AMD64
b) it likes a lot of RAM (4GB really seems to be the minimum, the
solarisinternals.com wiki suggests 1 GB per TB storage.
Can the above board be fitted with 4 or 8 GB RAM?

Both is not easily done with low-power VIA-boards, last time I looked.

Anecdotal reports from other people suggest it's possible to run it in low-mem i386 configs - but it needs a lot of tuning and is prone to crashing on heavy use.

I'd either totally scrap the idea of running a TB-fileserver at home or, if you can afford the electricity-bill, go with a server-grade motherboard (or at least one that can take 8 GB of RAM), fit a LSI SAS card into it (or use SUNs OEM model) and buy an external SAS-SATA JBOD case specifically for that purpose.
Promise seem to have released one recently - we currently use MSA70s with SAS drives, but they are of course way off the chart for hobbyist-use.

So, as you can see there are some problems associated with the idea of running a low-power ZFS fileserver. Via just doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.



Rainer
.

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