Someone should just sell me this already

June 8, 2009 8:09 PM

Building your own RAID, let's talk hardware options...

Say the ultimate goal was to make something that looks like N5200 but ran Open Solaris for ZFS. The cheapest I have seen a N5200 is some $600. (even empty). (N7700 uses Linux, and ZFS in FUSE which I would rather not).

So assuming I need something Intel (well, or sparc I guess), 5 bays (or more), SATA.

Perhaps using something like a Q-Box 4 case, which fits 4x 5.25" space.

I should be able to fit something like a Supermicro 5 bay for the drives, which ends with 5 SATA ports. And takes up 3x 5.25" bays. The last bay in the case is half taken by the motherboard.

Now for the main board, seems the latest rage is the Intel Atom (yes?no?) and of that, the Z530 appears to be the embedded chip. Should I look at a ready made board with the chip, or a separate board, that can take the chip.

Of the Mini-ITX boards, I do not see any that directly has 5+ SATA ports:
Mini-ITX boards

So perhaps a 4-port SATA card is needed, or something drastic like using a PATA channel, with SATA adaptor.

I am guessing fanless is probably a good idea for raid? Or should I look at the MITX-6852 which appears to be aimed at embedded as well, and does come with 6-SATA ports.

Any other options to consider? I'm based in Tokyo, so I should be able to get most things, but it does make searching for information a hint harder.

That seems to land around $300, plus LCD display if I can find one to fit in a 5.25" bay.

(SATA Multiplier options are no-go.)

posted by lundman to computers & internet (4 comments total)

If you're not on the ZFS-discuss list, I'd recommend you check it out.

You probably want fans, unless noise is a major concern. Keep in mind that if you have 5-8 drives pulling 10-20 watts each, that's going to be the largest source of power consumption (and heat generator; and drives don't react well to being warm.)

I don't think it's going to be an option for the form factor you're looking for, but you may want to see if you can use ECC RAM.

Keep in mind that some ZFS operations can be CPU intensive, but for five disks in a home configuration you should be OK.

I don't think there's any SPARC-based boxes in this form factor.
posted by theclaw at 9:33 PM on June 8

Quite interesting.. It does seem better to buy the ready-made D945GCLF2 Intel Atom board, which comes with CPU, and just throw on a cheap 4 port SATA card. The other boards are the same price, plus you need to buy CPU.

You mentioned PSU, I was somewhat ignoring that part, but I really shouldn't be. If that case (are there more? it seems to be a hard thing to search for) has 200W PSU, and using your values, HDD pull 100W in total, the Atom pulls 33W. Which leaves 66W or so for "everything else", which includes fans though. Maayybe ok :)
posted by lundman at 11:14 PM on June 8

Remember that you pay for miniaturization. Buying a mini-ATX motherboard and small case will save you money over Mini-ITX.
posted by delmoi at 6:35 AM on June 9

Bit of a tangent, but...

If you're stuck on Mini-ITX, Intel makes two LGA 775 (Later Pentium through Core 2 CPUs, not Atom) boards that have 4 SATA ports on-board. I don't know of a source near you, but here is the Intel info: (1, 2). But to echo delmoi, mini-ATX would be cheaper (and probably offer better options for expansion later on as well).

But, slap some memory and an Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L (or the 440 if you need a tiny bit higher clock speed) at 35W thermal power into one of those boards, and you've got a decently low-power setup that won't heat up too much. I use that 430 chip in my personal file server (just running a mirrored drive setup, 2 low-power 1TB Western Digital Green drives), and it putts along without any problems. The good thing about that motherboard is that, if you ever need a little more processing power, it's a simple upgrade to throw a Core 2 dual or quad-core chip in there (if your PSU can handle it, that is). But even that Celeron should be on par with a single-core Atom. I know the Celeron 430 beats the older Atom 230 in most non-multimedia tasks (the Atom's design is optimized better for video encoding/decoding and such), so in a file server it should be fine.
posted by XcentricOrbit at 2:01 PM on June 9