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content/technical/2011/12/freebsd-zfs-powered-nas.html

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