ivorycruncher
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2012
- Messages
- 11
I've been running a Windows Home Server box as my NAS for the last 2-3 years, first on the original WHS, then an upgrade to WHS 2011. It never ran well, unfortunately, possibly in part due to the now-vintage nForce 4 core with single-core Athlon 64 CPU I was attempting to run it on. With the announcement that Microsoft is pulling the plug on WHS, and the utter hatred I have for the new Metro UI they're forcing on us in Server 2012, I decided to look for an alternative, and found FreeNAS.
Knowing full well my nForce 4 core just wasn't going to cut it, I did some research on FreeNAS sys reqs, and jumped on Newegg and put together a new core, spec'd as follows:
ASRock B75M LGA 1155 motherboard
Intel Celeron G530 CPU
8 GB G.Skill Ripjaw X Series RAM
CORSAIR Builder Series CX430 V2 PSU
That only set me back a hair over $200. I've been an AMD fan for years, largely due to more bang for the buck, but after reading up on Llano vs. SandyBridge, I determined that while AMD is better at graphics, Intel is better for raw number-crunching, so it made sense to go Intel this time. Also, I could have gotten a slightly cheaper motherboard, but sheesh, finding an LGA 1155 board that has more than one SATA III port for cheap is not easy (my board has three). Practically all the AMD boards I looked at are full of SATA III ports, no SATA II in sight. Not sure what Intel's problem is, but AMD clearly has them beat on chipsets in this regard.
Anyway, I then salvaged the two perfectly good 2TB SATA III Western Digital Green drives from my WHS box, where they had been running in a hardware RAID 1 array (poorly), and installed FreeNAS on a Kingston 4GB flash drive I had handy. After offloading all my data to another drive, I setup a proper 2 TB mirror running ZFS, and then copied everything back over the network.
First reaction......wow.....just......wow. Pushing my data back across my gigabit ethernet from my main Windows 7 box, I was sustaining a write speed of a bit over 50 MB/s for large files. And I can manage a read speed of somewhere in the ballpark of 70-80 MB/s back. This completely obliterates the I/O my old WHS config had. I think that system peaked somewhere around 18 MB/s, on a good day. Granted that was probably due in part to poor core hardware, but with that drastic of a difference, I'm positive that ZFS is now kicking butt and taking names on my network. I realized after all was said and done that I could have just plugged the backup drive into my FreeNAS box, imported the NTFS volume, and just copied across internally, but then I wouldn't have gotten to watch in awe as almost 700 GB worth of miscellaneous data (mostly video, music, and my TechNet ISO collection) just flew across my network.
Also, now that I'm venturing into the world of mixed-OS environments, I decided to take my now-free nForce 4 core, which happens to have dual NICs on-board, and build an Endian firewall box to replace my lousy $20 Rosewill wifi router. I almost get the feeling that I'm having entirely too much fun with all this. Next on my list, see what kind of trouble I can get into with IPv6. =)
Knowing full well my nForce 4 core just wasn't going to cut it, I did some research on FreeNAS sys reqs, and jumped on Newegg and put together a new core, spec'd as follows:
ASRock B75M LGA 1155 motherboard
Intel Celeron G530 CPU
8 GB G.Skill Ripjaw X Series RAM
CORSAIR Builder Series CX430 V2 PSU
That only set me back a hair over $200. I've been an AMD fan for years, largely due to more bang for the buck, but after reading up on Llano vs. SandyBridge, I determined that while AMD is better at graphics, Intel is better for raw number-crunching, so it made sense to go Intel this time. Also, I could have gotten a slightly cheaper motherboard, but sheesh, finding an LGA 1155 board that has more than one SATA III port for cheap is not easy (my board has three). Practically all the AMD boards I looked at are full of SATA III ports, no SATA II in sight. Not sure what Intel's problem is, but AMD clearly has them beat on chipsets in this regard.
Anyway, I then salvaged the two perfectly good 2TB SATA III Western Digital Green drives from my WHS box, where they had been running in a hardware RAID 1 array (poorly), and installed FreeNAS on a Kingston 4GB flash drive I had handy. After offloading all my data to another drive, I setup a proper 2 TB mirror running ZFS, and then copied everything back over the network.
First reaction......wow.....just......wow. Pushing my data back across my gigabit ethernet from my main Windows 7 box, I was sustaining a write speed of a bit over 50 MB/s for large files. And I can manage a read speed of somewhere in the ballpark of 70-80 MB/s back. This completely obliterates the I/O my old WHS config had. I think that system peaked somewhere around 18 MB/s, on a good day. Granted that was probably due in part to poor core hardware, but with that drastic of a difference, I'm positive that ZFS is now kicking butt and taking names on my network. I realized after all was said and done that I could have just plugged the backup drive into my FreeNAS box, imported the NTFS volume, and just copied across internally, but then I wouldn't have gotten to watch in awe as almost 700 GB worth of miscellaneous data (mostly video, music, and my TechNet ISO collection) just flew across my network.
Also, now that I'm venturing into the world of mixed-OS environments, I decided to take my now-free nForce 4 core, which happens to have dual NICs on-board, and build an Endian firewall box to replace my lousy $20 Rosewill wifi router. I almost get the feeling that I'm having entirely too much fun with all this. Next on my list, see what kind of trouble I can get into with IPv6. =)
