New Setup On HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer

[boardman411]

Hi, All

Looking at building a NAS server using a HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer, upgrade to 8Gb RAM.. 4 x 2TB Drives... The only question I have so far is where to put the FreeNAS binaries..

Does anyone know if I can use :

A Compact Flash Card - 2Gb
or a USB Thumb Drive
or a Vertical 40 Pin internal Module..

The HP Microserver has an internal USB port, but I'd rather a Flash Card if it had a slot for this..

I know the Micros Server is a popular choice for a NAS, so what has everyone else does... Thank you.

Shaun.

 

[jgreco]

You're going to be best off on a 4GB or larger thumb drive. I don't believe the N40L has a CF slot, and adding one is probably not exactly trivial.

 

[boardman411]

Thanks, Got myself a 8Gb USB Thumb Drive..
:D

 

[c32767a]

I just built a N40L. I used a 8g USB drive and the internal USB slot and it worked fine.

In case anyone is keeping score, It's a stock N40L. I did the BIOS hack so I could use the Optical SATA port as a 5th HDD.

I have 5 WD Caviar red 3TB drives and 3 GB of ram(I had a 1g ECC stick lying around).
I use it as an RSYNC target for my primary FreeNAS box (Dell T410) and the replication writes clock in around 60-80MB/s on the N40.


Not too bad for scrap disks and a $300 box.

 

[bmcclure937]

Damn... if you are calling 5xWD Caviar Red 3TB drives scrap then let me know if you have any extras lying around! I could upgrade my primary NAS with some of those.

Your backup NAS has more storage than my primary! :)

 

[darkryoushii]

So to hijack this thread a bit and ask c32767a a quick question.. how'd you get away with 3GB of RAM for 15TB of storage? I'm building a 15TB NAS that I hope to keep a while and always been speccing them out base on the assumption that I need 16GB of memory. :S

 

[c32767a]

So to hijack this thread a bit and ask c32767a a quick question.. how'd you get away with 3GB of RAM for 15TB of storage? I'm building a 15TB NAS that I hope to keep a while and always been speccing them out base on the assumption that I need 16GB of memory. :S

I don't use it for much. It's just an rsync target.

The freenas image is stock 8.3, with autotune enabled.

Like I said, it performs well on basic sequential reads and writes from the cli or one client.
According to the freenas stats collection and the stats on the network switch it's connected to, the rsync typically runs around 600-800Mb/s when it's moving files to the HP.

Over the holiday, I took the time to rebuild everything from scratch with 8.3 and raid-z2.

I got a rack mount AMD 12 bay server with 32g of ram from a surplus sale which I wanted to make my primary server. I had planned to make the T410 my backup machine and use the HP N40 for "other things". It turned out the AMD box was slightly louder than the turboprop planes that fly over my house, so I abandoned that idea.

I ended up with a 9 disk RAID-Z3 volume on my T410 and an 8 disk raid-z2 volume on the HP.

I also broke down and bought 3 8GB DIMMs for my main server and that seems to have significantly improved the performance of ZFS on that machine.

I spent some time testing the various configs and found I could live with the performance of the raid-Z3 for my primary machine, which serves as a media library, storage for the data I use for work (a modest number of large files with mostly sequential I/O) and a time machine target for my laptop, workstation and mac mini.

Oh, and I used a 4 bay ESATA enclosure to get the extra spindles. Apparently 8.3 supports multiple disks on the external ESATA port. I still don't completely understand whether the port multiplier is on the enclosure or on the motherboard. I was surprised, but it does work OK.

Even with the apparently sub optimal config. Replication regularly hits 600-800 Mb/s writes on to the N40, measured by the network switch it's attached to and the FreeNAS stats data.

I can't justify the cash for 10g interfaces right now.. Maybe someday.. :) I'll be curious to see what the N40 can actually do when it's not I/O limited by the single 1g ethernet port.

 

[c32767a]

All my disks are scrap disks.. "Real" disks would be 10k SAS.. or SSD :)

Most of my storage and backup are to support the data I use for work, so I do have a modest budget to support what is also my hobby. :)