2011-12-11 06:14:40 +00:00
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TODO: Add photos
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Recently the Time Machine drive on my Mac Pro started to randomly
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disappear and Mac OS X would say that I had removed it improperly,
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which was not true given it was an internal drive still inside the
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machine.
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I'd seen this behaviour before and in that case it resulted in the drive
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being replaced due to its inability to complete a short S.M.A.R.T.
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scan. This drive (also a Samsung) was suffering a similar problem except
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that initiating the S.M.A.R.T. scan would actually cause it to disappear
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from the SATA bus. A check on the Samsung site showed that the drive was
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out of warranty so I was up for a replacement.
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The Mac Pro wasn't getting used for much since I got a i7 powered Mac Book Pro.
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Its main duties involved storing my iTunes library, Aperture library and
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running my weather logger. It wasn't exactly a very energy efficient machine
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to run all the time. It would in fact keep the study warm overnight when the
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door was closed.
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There was also a problem with replacing the failing drive: I couldn't afford
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to do so. So I decided to move the weather logging to my [ALIX board][alix]
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and sell the Mac Pro to fund building a home NAS. I was able to sell the
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Mac Pro very quickly on eBay for $1500 but gave myself a budget of $1000 for
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the NAS. I wanted the NAS to have reliable redundant storage, which for me
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meant [ZFS]. This implied the new machine would need to run one of [Solaris],
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[Illumos], [FreeBSD], [FreeNAS] or [SmartOS]. The requirement to run one of
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these OS's ruled out an off the shelf NAS appliance.
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[ZFS]: TODO
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[alix]: TODO
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[Solaris]: TODO
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[Illumos]: TODO
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[FreeBSD]: TODO
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[SmartOS]: TODO
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I did a lot of research into different ways to build the machine and
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tried out all the OS options in virtual machines. I considered using
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basic PC hardware, MiniITX, HP MicroServer, etc. Each had its own pros
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and cons. The basic PC approach was possibly the cheapest but it was the
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largest. MiniITX was more expensive and choice of multi hard drive bay
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cases were limited. I ended up settling on the [HP Proliant MicroServer]
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running FreeBSD.
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[microserver]: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/hk/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237917-4237917-4248009-5163345.html
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The MicroSever is a neat little unit. It uses a low poert dual core AMD
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Turion II CPU and comes with 2Gb ECC RAM and a 250Gb HD. I has 4 non-hot
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swappable hard drive bays all packaged up in a squat little box. I ordered
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mine with an extra 2Gb or RAM as ZFS likes to have plenty of RAM available
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to run well.
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During my reesarch hard drive prices sky rocketed due to the floods
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in Thailand, however I was able to get some at pre-flood prices from
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[ht.com.au][ht]. They have since put the price up $40 (TODO) and placed order
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limits on them, so I got in at the right time.
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For the drives I chose 2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green's. They feature SATA 3
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and a 64Mb cache and run at the atypical 5900RPM. These drives seemed to be
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a good balance across energy efficiency, noise, performance and price.
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[ht]: http://ht.com.au/
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The final parts list ended up being the rater diminuative:
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* 1 × HP MicroServer (658553-371) + 2Gb extra RAM $336.82
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* 3 × 2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green Hard Drives $394.85
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The total cost ended up being $731.67, healthily under budget.
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Installng FreeBSD and setting up the ZFS pool was very
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straightforward. I'm running the drives in a RAIDZ configuration,
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giving 3.6Tb of usable storage. I currently have two ZFS filsystems
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on that. One in a normal configuration and the other for photos with
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`copies=2` set. I plan to try out enabling ZFS deduplication on the
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former filesystem soon.
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So the system all ran well for a few days however on the forth day one of
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the brand new drives failed and started making a terrible clicking, beeping
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noise. Fortunately HT replaced it very promptly and the replacement has
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been running fine since. During the time the failed drive was out for
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replacement the ZFS pool continued to run fine in its degraded state, with
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no data loss. Once the new drive was installed it was a simple matter of
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issuing `zfs replace ada1` and it began the process of resilvering the data
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onto the new drive and all it has been running well since.
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