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| Ozzik: Storage - The ultimate post |
26-10-07 20:20:52 |
Alright, so as promissed, here comes the final post about the storage I've been building for the last few weeks.
I know I already gave away some details in the previous posts, but I'd like to put everything in place, so I'll start over.
It began with me getting a SCSI unit named Fortra from a second hand place. It contained 10 180GB Seagate hard drives and a Chaparal RAID controller. I made 2 RAID5 arrays and had myself 1.4TB of storage, which was nice until disks stared to fail. It started happening on the first week and continued for the next 6. I had an average of 1 hard drive saying goodbye once a week. Sometimes it wasn't completely dead, but then it would mess up the RAID and I would have to clear its metadata and rebuild the whole array (process, which could take up to a night). As you might guess, I wasn't happy at all. The store where I got the unit, was pretty understanding about it, and at first, they gave me few hard drives for replacement for free, but when I said I wanna return it - they refunded my money without any problems.
It was time to look for a solution again, and I had no idea where to start. All the crap they're selling on the internet, isn't worth even looking at. Plus, the prices are way up in the sky, without any proportion.
So the only solution was to build something by myself.
As I still had the Fortra unit at home(I asked them for a small delay, till I can transfer all the data), I started to think about the things I could do with its case. After a few measurements, I came to a conclusion, that it can be done.
I made a deal with the store to return the drives, but to leave the case to myself. Then I screwed out all the inside stuff and left only drives cases. Took 8 regular SATA 500GB drives and put them in.
After that I drilled 4 holes in the bottom of the case and screwed in an old intel motherboard I had lying around with a 1.8GHz Celeron CPU and 512MB RAM(and onboard VGA). Bought a 430W Thermaltake PSU and put it in next to the MoBo. The only thing missing was the connection between the board and the drives - the board didn't have sata connectors.
So I found 2 cheap PCI sata raid controllers on ebay - it was $11 per card and contained 4 sata connectors each (by the way, they were brand new). After building the whole unit, I realized that the drives need some air, otherwise they're gonna die real soon. The thing is that previous drives didn't have any cooling at all, which was pretty weird to me, as they were never hot. I decided to try the new setup run without cooling, but it was obvious it ain't gonna last, so I went and bought 3 12cm fans for $8 each.
After screwing all in and tightening all the wires, it was time to find the right OS.
I previously tried few of the storage OS's, but never really got into them. So I had to decide between Openfiler, NASlite and FreeNAS.
After reading and compairing between the three, I decided to get FreeNAS a go.
Gotta tell you: I wasn't disappointed at all!
An amazing piece of software.
Let me tell you a bit about it. The downloaded image was only 38MB.
I connected a cd-rom drive for the installation and disconnected it right afterwards, as there is no need for it in the NAS. The installation itself took not longer than 20 seconds! That's right. After the main install all you have to do is configure the LAN (static IP and such) and you're done with the monitor and keyboard(mouse wasn't needed at all). Then you log on to the web interface and do everything from there.
When I first logged in, all I could say is WOW! The beaty of it was that it was absolutely simple, it had all the needed features and yet didn't have the 10000 features you would never use. It was exactly the OS I was looking for.
I'm not gonna tell you about the insides and the stuff you can do with it, as you can read all about it in the documentation on their homepage, but I wanna metion the things that I use and found very helpful, plus some features it misses(just found out about those a couple of days before).
Hits:
Simple, small, doesn't use too much of CPU or RAM, fast, very intuitive interface - took me about 5 minutes to understand it all, gets the job done!
Small hits:
Has an "edit file" feature in the web gui - very useful, gathers all kinds of info about the drives, shows the running processes on the system, supports wireless, supports all the needed protocols: CIFS, NFS, FTP, SSHD. Has Unison and RSYNCD built in. Has a backup/restore feature. Allows to save the config file for a quick restore in case of a system crash. Works with active directory and users. Supports hardware and software RAID(1, 5 +?)
Built on BSD!! (fork from m0n0wall).
Misses:
Besides the first drive (the one with the system), doesn't support partitioning, although works with already partitioned drives.
The native file system is UFS (as it is BSD), which is a good thing, but despite allowing to read from NTFS, ext2 and others, doesn't work very well with those, thus not recommended in case of valuable data.
Basically it works very well if you enter a new hard drive or one you're going to format and start from the begining, otherwise you might get some weird errors with mounting and such.
Another thing that really bugges me is that RSYNCD is very basic.
It allows you to only sync 1 share to another and schedule it. I guess it was made with a pretty small system in mind.
Of course in my case I had to sync at least 4 shares, plus I also needed to sync some subfolders. So I found on the forums that you can edit the /var/run/sync_local.sh file and copy/paste/edit the line that has your shares in it, and so actually expend the RSYNCD's possibilities. This way it will sync line by line, so it's all good. I just wish it was available from the gui.
Anyway, as you can see, even the little bugs are pretty easy to solve.
As for me, I had a RAID 1 solution in mind at first, but as it turns out, my RAID chipset was sil3114, which is the only chipset that the OS doesn't support, so I figured that the sync is just as good and decided to go with it.
I now have 4 500GB hard drives with Music, Movies, Concerts and TVShows, and 4 drives for sync, plus 1 drive I put on the secondary IDE just because I had this option, and 1 of 40GB (the smallest one I had at home) with the system, also on IDE.
That's that.
P.S. It's going in the rack, so the size doesn't bug me:)
Some pics:
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