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Thread: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

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    Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    So I'm contemplating building my own little FreeNAS box as I can't find any cheap off the shelf NAS devices that tick all my boxes )lower power draw, quiet, iscsi support).

    FreeNAS is tempting as I'd like to be able to use use iscsi and has been around for a while. I'm trying to figure out whether a little 1st gen Intel Atom mini-itx system has enough oomph to handle the iscsi workload, and whether I'll have any driver issues with mini-itx hardware.

    A big goal is to keep power draw down to under 20w total, so I'm, looking at Atom and 2.5 inch drives primarily.

    Anyone on here built an Atom based FreeNAS? Pitfalls, recommendations for motherboards?

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    I rolled my own with debian and iscsi_target.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscs...s/iscsitarget/

    Total control over what you need without any chuff and 28w with two 800gig green drives and a atom 330. Probably less with more modern HW.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    For my home server I decided to omit x86 compatibility and go for an ARM based solution. I Re-Imaged a QNAP TS-110 with Debian. It draws around 8W, and runs all the services I need.

    Detailed instructions here:
    http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-119/

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by abaxas View Post
    I rolled my own with debian and iscsi_target.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscs...s/iscsitarget/

    Total control over what you need without any chuff and 28w with two 800gig green drives and a atom 330. Probably less with more modern HW.
    Thanks for the idea. I'm not particularly a linux-head so will need to investigate how easy it is to configure. Ideally I would want a GUI to do stuff like create/resize LUNs and for the linux to be bootable off a flash drive to keep it physically separate from the data partitions. At work I'm used to the simplicity of HP MSA2000 SAN web configuration so FreeNAS' friendly interface kept me in my comfort zone.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by chrestomanci View Post
    For my home server I decided to omit x86 compatibility and go for an ARM based solution. I Re-Imaged a QNAP TS-110 with Debian. It draws around 8W, and runs all the services I need.

    Detailed instructions here:
    http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-119/
    I used a thecus n2100 originally however I found that throughput was about 40% of the atom box. Which was fine 99% of the time but for the sake of 8w difference and easy removable drives, I went with the atom.

    To the op.

    If you are looking for some cheapo itx kit... give me a prod.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Any particular reason you're looking for super low power? I use a Microserver with FreeNAS. I have an iSCSI client to my iMac Windows bootcamp install so I can install a bunch of games, and a bunch of SMB/CIFS shares too.

    It's probably not as low powered as an Atom box, but more flexible, and probably cheaper.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    Any particular reason you're looking for super low power? I use a Microserver with FreeNAS. I have an iSCSI client to my iMac Windows bootcamp install so I can install a bunch of games, and a bunch of SMB/CIFS shares too.

    It's probably not as low powered as an Atom box, but more flexible, and probably cheaper.
    It's a noisy bassa compared to a well built fanless atom box.

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    mush-mushroom b0redom's Avatar
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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Really? I have mine tucked away in a cupboard and I can't hear it. Even side by side with my PS3, I reckon the microserver is quieter.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    Really? I have mine tucked away in a cupboard and I can't hear it. Even side by side with my PS3, I reckon the microserver is quieter.
    It's that constant fan noise that hacks me off. Maybe I dont like things which are constant, I prefer things to change.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    Any particular reason you're looking for super low power?
    The cost of electricity.

    I run my home server 24x7. Before I setup the ARM based box, I was using a regular PC, and it was using a lot of electricity, and warming the room unneccearily. Switching to the low power ARM box has saved me arround £40 per month in reduced electricity bills.

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    What sort of budget do you have to play with?

    A few off the shelf NAS boxes come with iSCSI support and match/better your quoted power draw figure.

    The Synology DS212 (1.6GHz CPU, 256Mb RAM, 2.5"/3.5" HDD up to 6TB over 2 HDDs) and DS212+ (2 GHz, 512Mb, 6TB) are both under 20w (loaded). You may still be able to get hold of the previous models too, DS211 and DS211+ respectively.
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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    Quote Originally Posted by mycarsavw View Post
    What sort of budget do you have to play with?

    A few off the shelf NAS boxes come with iSCSI support and match/better your quoted power draw figure.

    The Synology DS212 (1.6GHz CPU, 256Mb RAM, 2.5"/3.5" HDD up to 6TB over 2 HDDs) and DS212+ (2 GHz, 512Mb, 6TB) are both under 20w (loaded). You may still be able to get hold of the previous models too, DS211 and DS211+ respectively.
    Looks like a good product. My instincts are telling me to go down the low power PC route rather than dedicated NAS as I can repurpose it if my needs change. Also I'd really like to go 100 percent fanless if possible.

    Budget wise I reckon an mini-itx board is about £75
    Already have a pico-psu style thing lying in cupboard
    Case will be an old biscuit tin and park it under the stairs - £0
    Couple of drives, maybe mirrored Samsung Spinpoint M7E 640GB from Scan at £65 each


    Having said that, at £59 the ARTiGO A2000 is very tempting
    http://www.mini-itx.com/store/

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    Re: Low wattage FreeNAS / iscsi hardware advice please

    I have a mini-itx system with two 2.5" drives in a RAID1 configuration, which draws <40 watts. I use a pico PSU to run it. It does have a small cooling fan on the case (40mm) which is controlled by the mobo, but the nise is not intrusive. Performance is not stellar, but it is good enough to run a public webserver, a mailserver and internal streaming service on the back of Fedora core 15.
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