DIY ZFS Home Server
August 5th, 2010Wow! I haven’t written here in months. Time to run a number of updates and get things active again…
I am in the planning stages of building a diy opensolaris box. In the wake of Oracle acquiring Sun, who knows how well Oracle will keep OpenSolaris up to date. However, the potential of zfs entices me to try it out in the original habitat.
The most important part of a computer is always the case. I had a tough requirement this time around: I wanted 8 3.5″ bays and as quiet as possible. It may seem greedy, but I like the idea of setting up two four drive raidz2 mirrors. The quietest one I could find is made by Fractal Design in Sweden and gives Antec a run for their money in terms of loudness.
Fractal Design Define R2 Black Pearl:
You can see that this is an awesome potential box for storing a beast of a NAS. I am nailing down the final details for the internals, but it looks like I should be able to come up with a fairly affordable machine. I may also need to wait for the 2TB drive price point to drop since the low power “green” drives are apparently quite awful in performance and the server based drives are right now cheap at 1TB size. In addition, It looks like AMD consumer chips are the only processors that will support server type ECC memory. So, there you have it. More to come.