Bod Block

Firstly thanks for all of you who have quietly tweeted me just to make sure that I'm alive, I can verify that I'm very much alive; just suffering a bit from blogger's block and a complete lack of blog inspiration. 

I've been building a new storage block for the Bod Block. It's kind of crazy what we can now run at home and the quality of the home NAS products available, I'm a big fan of the Synology NAS boxes and the fact that they just work.

But this time, I've decided to build my own again. I came across someone selling a 1U Mini-ITX case on Ebay at a reasonably cheap price and it spiraled from there.

Add a Gigabyte GA-D510UD Motherboard; an Atom based dual core box with 4 on-board SATA ports and a Gigabit Ethernet. 

2 x cheapo 2Gb DDR2 sticks

2 x Intel E1000 Gigabit Ethernet cards which I had lying around.

4 x Samsung 2 Tb Spinpoint F3 EcoGreen Hard Drives

and a 4 Gb Flash Disk for a boot drive.

Put it all together, turn it on and swear! Ye gods the power-supply is noisy. Find a supplier for silent 1U power-supply; fortunately with an Atom-based motherboard, the draw is so low, that I can get away with a fairly low-wattage power-supply and there are fan-less 1U power-supplies around.

New power-supply arrives and what do you know? It is indeed silent but its ATX connector is too short, order an extension cable and some shorter SATA cables whilst I'm at it for cabling tidiness. 

Put it all together again and find that the CPU fan is noisey as well and it vibrates the case. Order some quiet fans.

Fans arrive, put it all together again and yet more noise but it's quieter. 

Go to my craft box and find a small sachet of Sugru; make some anti-vibration grommets and life is much better. So it's not silent but it's pretty close, I think it's quieter than my Synology DS409 and it's certainly cheaper even after all the extra bits I was not expecting to buy.

I've decided to give NexentaStor a whirl as my storage operating system and from a raw performance point of view, it's doing pretty well. I can get 60-70Mbytes out of it via NFS, CIFS and iSCSI; wierdly, it seems to perform better at write operations. I've not set-up the additional Gigabit interfaces yet, next on my to-do list.  

I've found a few niggles and it took a couple of attempts to get it installed to a USB stick and I am really not sure what I did to get it installed. The GUI looks nice but it is strangely counter-intuitive and some things just do not work properly. Group editting for example needs to be done from the CLI to get it to stick.

Is it better than OpenFiler or FreeNAS? 

Well I seem to get similar performance from all of them, so I suspect that's a hardware bottle-neck. As a pure storage device, Nexenta is probably better featured; for all round capability tho' including wierd and wonderful protocols such as AFP and also additional media-serving capabilities, you'd have to go a long way to beat FreeNAS. Openfiler is probably easier to get up and running if you are looking for a pure storage system but if you want dedupe, compression, replication, automated tiering; NexentaStor is the one for you. 

Just be aware that at times, you are probably going to end up scratching your head and end up at the CLI to get it do what you want. That said, I managed to provision 30 iSCSI LUNs extremely quickly from the CLI and it is probably easier and more logical than the NetApp CLI amongst others.

Of course, you could just be sensible and buy an appliance off the shelf but where would the fun be in that.