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Comment by rll | Hacker News Reader

I just built one recently. Motherboard-wise you should get one that supports ECC ram. Other than that it doesn't matter that much. You typically don't use the onboard SATA ports either, so the motherboard specs aren't very important. I built one recently. A bit of CPU overkill, but otherwise a pretty standard build. You can see the hardware list here:

http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/58-Building-a-NAS.html

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Very nice build there! Question though: Have you measured how much power it consumes when idle and when under load?

That's been my main thing holding me back from building a beefed up home server/NAS box. Friend of mine used to have an all-in-one HTPC/NAS/webserver box that would put close to $30 a month on his electricity bill. (Although you could argue he needed to run the heater less as a result..)

No, I have been meaning to, but the drives spin down when idle and it is a Haswell CPU which has decent power saving features as well so It will be nowhere near $30/month.

So crazy that I have been parting out an almost identical build with an E3-1230v2 and a Supermicro board, Fractal design case, etc... and then boom the creator of PHP mentions that he built one too.

That's the sign I needed. Gonna take the plunge. @rasmus have you been on the 9.2 RC's and now the release or are you on 9.1? I've been having significant issues with 9.2. It's the best software out there to roll your own NAS though. Nas4Free is pretty rad too but falls significantly short when you compare it side-by-side with FreeNAS.

Also, regarding LAGG/LACP, I noticed some pretty radical throughput increases after experimenting it on my home network. It took me a while to decide on a Layer 2 managed switch, but I ultimately went with the TP-Link SG3216 (new from Amazon, pretty cheap for a 16port gigabit managed device) and it's been great.

I think that once a connection is open, it will route through one single interface, so it won't help much between two boxes. But, as you said, having multiple devices connecting and backing up simultaneously will take advantage of the multiple links.

No, I didn't try any of the 9.2 releases yet. I am still on 9.1.

What reasons are there for ignoring the onboard SATA ports?

Well he has a RAID controller in his build, so I would assume you ignore the built-in SATA so you can use RAID. He's also using SAS connectors to convert four SATA cables into one SAS connector (to avoid having to have eight cables running from the drives to the board).

No, FreeNAS uses ZFS for RAID. Generally, you want to disable any RAID features in your card so it presents the disks as JBOD to the OS to avoid incompatibilities, which he did.

It is also hard to find a motherboard with 8 SATA ports. They are out there, but you end up getting them split across different types of controllers which makes things complicated. And since you can pick up an M1015 for around $100 and flash it to IT mode I see no point in messing around with shaky onboard SATA controllers.

Recently you can also get an Asrock Avoton motherboard with 12 SATA ports, spreaded across three controllers, but that shouldnt be any problem.

That board actually splits the SATA ports across 3 controllers and they are not all 6Gbps. It also costs nearly $400 and doesn't support ECC ram. If you are going to build a ZFS-based NAS you really should be using error correcting ram. Buying a cheap $130 Supermicro board and a $100 M1015 seems like a smarter and cheaper solution.

It uses 3 controllers, true, but 8 ports out of 12 are SATA III 6GB/s ports, and the controllers split should not be an issue. The statement about not supporting ECC is untrue, that board in fact does support ECC RAM. Also, its $400, but its not a board alone but it also includes the CPU and cooling for it, it wont require PCI controller due to high number of ports (wider choice of smaller cases) and requires amazingly low amount of power.

Ah oops, misread the ASROCK specs and that board does support ECC ram so in that sense it is ok. And the low power consumption of the Atom chip would work well. I still don't like the price though.

Getting split across multiple controllers is not a bad thing if you want to avoid corruption due to failed / faulty controller (I've got six controllers in my box, driving 12 disks).

If the controllers were the same type I would agree, but that seems to never be the case with these.

You shouldn't want controllers of the same type, no? That increases chances of data loss due to design flaw.

I am more worried about driver issues. For example on my hackintosh the SATA ports on the Marvel controller are extremely flaky. It may be that the fbsd device drivers are great for the various on board Marvel or Jmicron controllers you are likely to see but I still feel better using the known LSI driver.

Hey, I have that exact same case for our server. It's a couple years old, with a Sandy Bridge cpu, but it's worked perfectly, is pretty quiet, and doesn't use a lot of power. I only used onboard SATA though.

At least some of the Haswell core i3's also support ECC. The 4130T in particular uses about half the power of the Xeon mentioned, for a bit less money.

The power/performance envelope is about the same for both processors (Haswell version of the Xeon (E3-1230v3) and i3-4130T) . So you are trading performance for power in a full load scenario, the idle power usage is going to be similar. Geekbench scores, price and full load power usage for the i3 is about 1/2 of the Xeon, go figure.

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