Re: Building a low-power FreeBSD media server
- From: Neil Bradley <nb_no_spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:11:20 GMT
Josh wrote:
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?
As someone who has done almost this exact thing with FreeBSD, my advice is to find a way to be able to power down your hard drives when they aren't in use. If you have 6 drives, they pull roughly 10 watts at idle (each), so dropping that 60 watts down to <5 watts will save you appreciable power - moreso than going the VIA vs. low end Celeron route (the CPU, in practice, won't make much difference in terms of power pulled, but also remember that the C7 doesn't perform as well Mhz to Mhz over the Celerons). Look at the idle power consumption of each CPU. Also, make sure FreeBSD can talk to the VIA C7 hardware. The onboard ethernet port didn't work at all for me with 7.0.
The trick is finding a storage controller that will spin the drives down due to inactivity. If you can find one, let *ME* know. ;-)
-->Neil
.
- References:
- Building a low-power FreeBSD media server
- From: Josh
- Building a low-power FreeBSD media server
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