ewhac
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2013
- Messages
- 177
Apologies in advance for this post being rather unstructured.
The underlying impetus is thus: I require more NAS storage, and my current FreeNAS box is too small to accommodate it.
My current FreeNAS box is an (absolutely adorable) HP N54L with 8GiB RAM, 3x2TB Hitachi Deskstar drives in a RAID-Z1 vdev, and a flaky 250GB drive all by itself, mostly used as a guinea pig.
Things I like and would like to preserve about this setup:
A storage expansion alternative is an external JBOD box with a SAS connector on the back (and adding a PCIe SAS controller to the N54L). But it has the distinct odor of a kluge, and the cost of doing it rivals that of building a completely new box.
Now it would be easy to say, "Hey, it's FreeNAS. You're in Big Boy territory. If you wanted cheap, you should have gone with Synology." To which I could easily respond, "Really. Have you priced a diskless 8-bay Synology box recently? That's fscking highway robbery." Besides, I'm not trying to cheap out; I'm already mostly on board with spending well north of $600 just on drives. I would just very much like them to be in an adorable little box rather than a big ugly noisy slab that I have to keep in another room.
...All of which is a meandering, roundabout way of asking: Which of my above desires is demonstrably the least reasonable, and I should let go of first?
The underlying impetus is thus: I require more NAS storage, and my current FreeNAS box is too small to accommodate it.
My current FreeNAS box is an (absolutely adorable) HP N54L with 8GiB RAM, 3x2TB Hitachi Deskstar drives in a RAID-Z1 vdev, and a flaky 250GB drive all by itself, mostly used as a guinea pig.
Things I like and would like to preserve about this setup:
- It's quiet.
- It's small and can sit on my desk, where I can observe its activity. (Seriously, being able to watch activity LEDs is enormously reassuring, especially since GUIs are increasingly given to telling outright stinking lies.)
- It was comparatively inexpensive -- barely $300 for a CPU, motherboard, case, and power supply.
- I require more storage. However, RAID-Z1 is already risky even with 2TB spindles, so I need to move to RAID-Z2. You can do a four-drive RAID-Z2 vdev, but that's cost-inefficient; a six-drive RAID-Z2 would be better. But six drives won't fit in an HP N54L. Therefore it would appear...
- I require a new case. I would like to preserve the small, cute, quiet, desktop-friendly characteristics of the N54L. But there appear to be precious few cases that can host a Mini-ITX motherboard, and hold at least six 3.5" hot-swap drives, and keep relatively cool and quiet, and look decent on my desk. (The U-NAS NSC-810 looks promising, but reviews are uneven at best.) Once you start asking for six or more hot-swap bays, you're in to rackmount territory, which is occasionally cute, but rarely small or quiet.
A storage expansion alternative is an external JBOD box with a SAS connector on the back (and adding a PCIe SAS controller to the N54L). But it has the distinct odor of a kluge, and the cost of doing it rivals that of building a completely new box.
Now it would be easy to say, "Hey, it's FreeNAS. You're in Big Boy territory. If you wanted cheap, you should have gone with Synology." To which I could easily respond, "Really. Have you priced a diskless 8-bay Synology box recently? That's fscking highway robbery." Besides, I'm not trying to cheap out; I'm already mostly on board with spending well north of $600 just on drives. I would just very much like them to be in an adorable little box rather than a big ugly noisy slab that I have to keep in another room.
...All of which is a meandering, roundabout way of asking: Which of my above desires is demonstrably the least reasonable, and I should let go of first?
