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162 lines
6.8 KiB
HTML
162 lines
6.8 KiB
HTML
## Summary
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Here's the tl;dr version: I sold my Mac Pro to fund building a home
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NAS. The result is a HP MicroServer with 4Gb RAM and 3 × 2Tb hard
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drives running FreeBSD from the system drive and a ZFS pool across the
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three 2Tb drives. Total cost: AU$731.67.
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## Rationale
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Recently the Time Machine drive in 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've 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
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Book Pro. Its main duties involved storing my iTunes library, Aperture
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library and running my weather logger. It wasn't exactly a very energy
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efficient machine to run all the time. It would in fact keep the study
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warm overnight when the door was closed during winter.
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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]: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
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[alix]: /technical/2011/12/openwrt-on-alix/
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[Solaris]: http://oracle.com/solaris
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[illumos]: https://www.illumos.org/
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[FreeBSD]: http://www.FreeBSD.org/
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[SmartOS]: http://smartos.org/
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[FreeNAS]: https://www.illumos.org/
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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
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pros and cons. The basic PC approach was possibly the cheapest but it
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was the largest. MiniITX was more expensive and choice of multi hard
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drive bay cases were limited. I ended up settling on the [HP Proliant
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MicroServer][microserver] 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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<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
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$(function () {
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var alt = $(document.createElement('img')).attr('src', '/images/2012/01/_MG_0581.jpg');
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$('#inside-outside-view').toggle(function() {
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$(this).attr('src', alt.attr('src'))
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}, function() {
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$(this).attr('src', '/images/2012/01/_MG_0582.jpg')
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});
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});
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</script>
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<figure>
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<img id="inside-outside-view" src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0582.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="Inside/outside view of HP MicroServer" />
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<figcaption>The end result. Click/tap to toggle inside view.</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<figure>
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<img src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0583.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="Fron of MicroServer with CD for size comparison" />
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<figcaption>CD for size comparison.</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<figure>
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<img src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0584.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="Oblique view of HP MicroServer" />
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<figcaption>Oblique view (excuse the finger prints).</figcaption>
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</figure>
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## The Build
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The MicroServer is a neat little unit. It uses a low power 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 research hard drive prices sky rocketed due to 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 and placed order
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limits on them.
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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 an 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 rather diminutive:
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* 1 × [HP MicroServer][microserver] (658553-371) + 2Gb extra RAM $336.82
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* 3 × [2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green Hard Drives][hard-drives] $394.85
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[hard-drives]: http://www.ht.com.au/cart/1/part/V0531-Seagate-Barracuda-Green-ST2000DL003-hard-drive-2-TB-SATA-600/detail.hts
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The total cost ended up being $731.67, healthily under budget.
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<figure>
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<img src="/images/2012/01/IMG_0097.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="Installing RAM into HP MicroServer" />
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<figcaption>Installing the extra RAM.</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<figure>
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<img src="/images/2012/01/IMG_0098.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="Installing hard drives into HP MicroServer" />
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<figcaption>Installing the hard drives.</figcaption>
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</figure>
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## Software
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Installing 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 file systems
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on that. One in a normal configuration and the other for photos with
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`copies=2` set.
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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 it has been running incident free since.
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$ zpool status
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pool: storage
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state: ONLINE
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scan: resilvered 1.07T in 9h32m with 0 errors on Tue Nov 29 07:13:29 2011
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config:
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NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
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storage ONLINE 0 0 0
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raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
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ada1 ONLINE 0 0 0
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ada2 ONLINE 0 0 0
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ada3 ONLINE 0 0 0
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errors: No known data errors
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After setting up the OS and file systems the only other thing I
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needed to so was make the storage available to other machines on the
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network. Since my house is all Macs I built [netatalk] via the FreeBSD
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ports collection to make the storage available via <abbr title="Apple
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Filing Protocol">AFP</abbr>.
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[netatalk]: http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/
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With that done it's the sever shows up in the Finder via Bonjour and
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copying/accessing data is dead simple.
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