(Contra-?)recommendations on consumer-grade NAS?

[Louis Kowolowski]

On Oct 24, 2008, at 9:14 AM, David Wolfskill wrote:
> * PGP Signed: 10/24/08 at 09:14:40
>
> While I expect that if I really wanted to go through the hassle, I  
> could
> build a machine & load it up with (e.g.) FreeNAS, it would be rather a
> chore -- and should the slightest thing be perceived as being not  
> quite
> right, I'd need to deal with it directly.
>
I supposed I'm somewhat biased on this matter, but oh well.

I've been running FreeNAS (both production and testing) in a couple of  
environments for approx. a year now.
I've got a Dell PowerEdge 1850 (dual cpu, 2.x GHz, 4G RAM) driving a  
PowerVault 220 (SCSI attach disk array with 14x300G 10k disks).  It's  
running FreeNAS 0.62 (based off FreeBSD 6.2R).  It has a single RAID5  
volume (comprised of 14x300G disks) that is shared via NFS to our  
VMWare ESX servers and hosts VMs that build various products (the  
sanity of this will be saved for other discussions).  I am seeing  
anywhere between 200Mbit and 800Mbit network throughput, from 5 ESX  
servers and approx. 20 VMs.  Setup for this took perhaps 30min. the  
first time, and and closer to 5 the second (no experimenting the  
second time).  All done through a browser.

The second instance of FreeNAS that I've been using is of a nightly  
build that supports AMD64 and ZFS.  I've been running this for about  
2mo. now on my home system that is comprised of a core2duo 2GHz, 2G,  
7x750G ATA (connected to a 3ware controller but not using RAID).  It  
mostly stores backups, music, and pictures.  I've not seen any data  
corruption, crashes or the like.  Navigating through the ZFS portion  
of the webby took a little testing, but again, entire configuration  
was not more than 15min the first time.  It has survived several power  
outages, including one that had a very brief power on and then another  
power off.  All data appears to be intact and usable (and no fsck  
thanks to ZFS!).

--
Louis Kowolowski                                louisk at cryptomonkeys.com
Cryptomonkeys:                      http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/~louisk

Making life more interesting for people since 1977