Building your own storage server with freenas

My goal was to create an affordable storage server that has a capacity around 10 TB, to store my favorite collections on it and make some backups from various system. And most important … It doesn’t use a lot of juice…

I was also looking at some QNAP’s and SYNOLOGY’s NAS drives but they are all pretty expensieve  especialy the ones that could house 8 drives or more.

I used the following components to build/house my storage server. (note that most of these part where laying aroung in my house.)

1x Antec Performance 182   (Case) 1x ASUS  E35M1-M                 (Motherboard) Low power  1.6 GHZ AMD proc. 2x 4GB  Memory                  (RAM memory) 1x BeQuite 350                     (Powersupply) 3x 1tb  WD Disks                  (Storage) 3x 2tb  WD Disks                  (Storage) 1x Vertex2 128GB                (Caching) 1x 2GB usb stick                   (OS)

With this setup I have around 9+ TB total storage to play with. I want some redundancy so this will be setup in a ZFS (Zetabyte File System) RAID-Z Pool.

What the ***  is ZSF ? ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots andcopy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name was a trademark of Oracle^[3] until September 20, 2011.^[4] (Source = Wikipedia ;) )

What is RAIDZ ? RAID-Z is not actually a kind of RAID, but a higher-level software solution that implements an integrated redundancy scheme similar to RAID 5, using ZFS.^[15] RAID-Z avoids the RAID 5 “write hole”^[16] using copy-on-write: rather than overwriting data, it writes to a new location and then automatically overwrites the pointer to the old data. It avoids the need for read-modify-write operations for small writes by only ever performing full-stripe writes. Small blocks are mirrored instead of parity protected, which is possible because the file system is aware of the underlying storage structure and can allocate extra space if necessary. RAID-Z2 doubles the parity structure to achieve results similar to RAID 6: the ability to sustain up to two drive failures without losing data.^[17][18][19] (Source = Wikipedia ;) )

More to come in the next week ;)