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Sub $1500 DIY SFF 1GB DDR, Dual GbE, SATA II, RAID 5, 2.0TB NAS, quiet, and low power. Just add OS.

I found these prices at various locations.

Morex Venus 668B Case - $95.00
Commell LV-673NS Pentium M Mini-ITX Mainboard - $335.00
1GB PC3200 DDR -$56.00
Intel Celeron M CPU 1.30GHZ/1M CACHE/400MHZ FSB SL7RA - $45.00
Hitachi DeskStar 7K500 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA Hard Drive - 4 x $199.00
HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 PCI Express to SATA II RAID Controller - $145.99

This looks very interesting. I'm about to retire a similar box (a little higher spec actually), so I could easily add a RAID card and the same as you.
I'm a bit concerned about performance though. Have you measured file read/write performance accross the LAN?

And does anyone with a similar box have a GigE interface to report performance on that? I suspect it wouldn't be great though...

As several previous posters have mentioned, if you are going to do pure file sharing then you cannot beat a dedicated NAS box. NAS box does what it says on the tin, its a file server.

If you are going to the expense of building a PC, you might as well its power. For example mine does,
- File + Print sharing including Anti-virus scanning
- Internet proxy server with content filtering, caching, bandwidth shaping
- Web + FTP server
- Usenet download
- VMWare with guest O/S acting as a domain controller, DHCP, DNS, etc
Plus off load most of my computing tasks to it (e.g video encoding, PAR, RAR, etc)
All these functions (aside from the DC) are free items that a NAS server cannot do. You have paid for the power and flexibility of a PC, might as well make use of them.

I have also taken a power reading for my system (total cost approx $1k),
Intel D805 Overclocked to 3.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, intergrated GFx, Gb NIC, 3Ware 7506 RAID controller, 2nd Gb NIC, 8 x 250GB Samsung HDD, 8 x 80mm fan. Total power as startup = 325w, idle = 280, full load = 315w.

Here's my test results using the same parameters and 64k records in IOZone as your tests.
[code:1:1f2db36f59]
Write:
filesize (k) speed (MB/s)
32768 51.659
65536 54.018
131072 47.905
262144 28.789
524288 34.469
1048576 36.241


Read:
filesize (k) speed (MB/s)
32768 60.133
65536 58.101
131072 53.663
262144 48.462
524288 55.365
1048576 37.286[/code:1:1f2db36f59]

System specs on the server are:
athlonxp 2500
768 MB DDR400 (512+256)
160 PATA, 300 SATA, 320 SATA, 400 PATA
Asus A7N8X deluxe
Intel pro 1000MT nic
Slackware 10.2 with the 2.6 kernel and standard packages installed, Xserver rarely running

Aside from the nic that i bought on purpose when i got a GbE switch, and the harddrives i buy whenever i see a great deal, i had all this stuff lying around. I'm not running any kind of raid, although it is set up in a sort of virtual JBOD fashion as there are shortcuts that point to various drives on the actual linux box that appear as normal folders to connected clients. I'm not sure why the performance of the machine in the article wasn't a bit faster, and considering my results and the results others have posted, i'm extremely disappointed with the performance of off the shelf NAS solutions. Why are they SO slow?

p.s. I feel stupid, but why is my post centered instead of left-justified?

Hello all,

I would just like to share my experiences with RAID and NAS for home use.

I recently bought an Infrant ReadyNAS NV and loaded it with 4x250GB SATA drives (2x Maxtor, 2x Seagate) and configured it to use Infrant's expandable X-RAID configuration. I have around 680GB effective capacity available.

I bought this system with the expectation that it should be easy to configure, easy to upgrade, provide good data security, and provide good transfer rates compared to my growing collection of 2.5" and 3.5" USB/FireWire Combo HDD enclosures...

Initially, I was looking at a 4-drive 3.5" HDD enclosure with a FireWire-to-RAID-5 bridge chip. (like the ones available at http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net )

However, the thought of having a relatively expensive (around $1,500) Quad-bay RAID-5 enclosure or a $700 Quad-bay Dual-RAID0/1 enclosure from a no-name (probably some Taiwanese OEM company) manufacturer shipped all the way to the Philippines, then hoping that I don't encounter any compatibility issues with my locally purchased hard drives, and then further hoping I don't encounter problems hooking it up with my PCs really put a damper on my enthusiasm.

I consider myself tech-savvy enough to get it to work (After all, I've been fiddling with PCs and their associated peripherals since the late '80s... 8) ), but I guess I balked at the risk ($1,500 -- even $700 -- is no joke in a country where the minimum monthly wage is less than $200) and I chickened out and bought the safer ReadyNAS solution...

Anyway, going back to the ReadyNAS, it was easy to configure (it had those large fold-out color diagrams ), it should be easy to upgrade (to be validated in the future when I actually upgrade the drives), it provides good data security (hot-plug HDD trays definitely are a plus), but sadly transfer rates are not as good as I expected.

Using a Gigabit Ethernet LAN adapter (built-in Intel PRO 1000 MT) on my main PC (Dual Xeon 2.4GHz/Asus PP-DLW/1GB RAM/WinXP) with a D-Link 5-port Gigabit Switch (DGS-1005D) and 9014-byte Jumbo Frames (the maximum size the D-Link Switch supported), I was only able to get the following transfer rates (using the Infrant IOMeter test method):

Read transfer rate: 25MB/sec
Write transfer rate: 17MB/sec

(Without jumbo frames, the performance takes a hit... around 20 Read /12 Write MB/sec)

This is a significant difference from the ~40MB/sec (Read/Write) you can get from a FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 2.5" HDD enclosure with a decent hard drive.

Of course you have to factor in the built-in processor / RAM of the ReadyNAS appliance. At around 200+ MHz and 256MB, as well as the overhead for the RAID-5 hardware, it shouldn't be a surprise that it would be slower than the FireWire/USB enclosures, but I thought I could get more by upgrading my network to Gigabit Ethernet...

I guess I was too optimistic about the NAS performance, I was expecting something closer to the 30+MB/sec Write transfer I experienced when transfering files between two HP Proliant DL-380 Servers with Hardware RAID-5 over a Cisco Catalyst 2960G Gigabit Ethernet switch I encountered at work....

I also tried configuring my oldest working PC (AMD K6-460/Asus T2P4/96MB RAM) as a NAS running Linux, upgrading it with a Realtek 8169-based gigabit ethernet card in the process.

I've used both FreeNAS 0.66 and Ubuntu Linux 5.10 and here are the results of the IOMeter test (still tested from my main PC):

FreeNAS 0.66
Read/Write: 6MB/sec

Ubuntu Linux 5.10
Read/Write: 12MB/sec

FreeNAS was easier to install and use, unfortunately, it seems that it's network driver doesn't like my LAN card...

At least the results made me appreciate the ReadyNAS' performance.

As a point of reference, I tried the IOMeter test using my main PC and an older PC with a new D-Link gigabit ethernet card and a Promise UltraTX2 to support the 250GB hard drive installed (PIII-800MHz/Asus P3B-F/512MB RAM):

Read/Write: ~20MB/sec

I guess it would take a lot more hardware and tweaking to utilize the potential bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet with a NAS solution.... sigh... Maybe I should have reconsider the FireWire-attached RAID solutions after all....

Well, I hope you aren't bored with my long and winding post and my tale will help others who want to experiment with NAS and RAID.

Regards.

^_^

Interesting data there. I have a question - did you have the chance to check the transfer rates withought the Switch in the middle? I'm wondering if the switch makes any difference (you never know)...

when i view this board at home it is all centered, but when i view it at work it is normal. very strange.

anyway this thread is far too boring and mature. Shouldn't we start bitching and moaning about whether he should have used an intel or amd cpu in it?
;-)

As a side issue Bill: it would be very interesting to see how slow a cpu you could put in the box without affecting the performance. That way people could see what the real minimum is. Can you try underclocking the cpu?

Hey, I just wanted to thank you all for this article again. I built up a nas from an old Dell Dimension 8100 P4. I put a SCSI card in and attached it to an old DVD ROM server, and added an extra 160GB HD I had lying around to it.
I followed the directions in the article and BAM! Instant NAS.

I did however, use the UBUNTU 6.06 Lite Server edition. Its all command line stuff but it seems to work just fine.

Thanks again!

Hi zyberwoof. Yes, there is a raid product that lets you use different sized drives. It is call un-raid by Lime Technology http://www.lime-technology.com

It has a parity drive, and does no stripping at all. The Parity drive must be equal to or larger than any other drive in the system. Then you can add drives when you want, up to 12 of them. That way you can pick up the Frys specials or the cheap after rebates drives to bring the cost low. Two additional benefits to this approach, is that for normal reading, only the drive that has the data need to be spinning. The rest can be powered down. Also, if you happen to lose 2 drives, then you only lose the data on those drives, not the whole set. This system is popular with Home Theater crowd.

Its drawbacks, are that it only supports a limited set of motherboards, and is a software raid solution. And it appears to be a one-man company, so support at times is spotty.

But it has the best of most worlds, when comparied to raid 5, etc.

Jeff

Here is a very good explanation between the RAID 0+1 and RAID 10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

If you have 4 drives, what is the advantage of going with RAID 5 over RAID 10?

Raid 5 uses less overhead than raid 10.

That link was already posted.

Just finishing up an article (draft is off to Tom's) comparing the Sempron 2200+ with a Duron 1.5 GHz. On Ubuntu with no-RAID5, makes a pretty big difference. On ClarkConnect (Fedora) not as big a difference and slower than Ubuntu.

This is a great question. I'm sure Tim and I will talk it over.

bill

Is anyone here using RAID on direct attached storage?

It seems to me that NAS is often a stepping stone product for people. I have a friend who is a digital photographer with a Better Light (http://www.betterlight.com/) scan-back camera that takes images of up to 1 gigabyte in resolution.

I built him a NAS last year that has 2 TB of RAID5 in it. He's happy with it but not delighted. I think he needs something like the Wiebetech G5Jam+ which will let him RAID0 up to 12 SATA drives.

He came to my door needing a big store to organize his 40 linear feet of CDRs of backup images (40' measured across the CDs as they stand up with the thin edge facing you). The server I sold him does that job well. But along the way his need *shape*shifted* into wanting a lightning fast store to work on images in Photoshop with. That has to be an attached storage solution.

Firewire 800 will get to 50 megabytes per second. ESata will get up to 230 to 240 megabytes per second. That's what I'm learning. Is anyone playing with this direct attached stuff?

Or, how about infiniband?

bill

We just installed an EMC Clarion X300 for our organization of 100 people and 5 servers. The Servers are attached with 2 fiber host bus adapters. We also opted for the LTO3 direct fiber attached tape vault. The Servers have 4GB/s throughput. The Tape vault backs up from the servers at 2GB/s.

I was utterly impressed at its speed.

EMC makes a budges line that uses SATAII drives that go up to 6TB+ of SATAII direct attached storage. Its the fastest thing I've seen so far.

I think a good raid controller, like an Areca will do the job fine. They are available in pci-x and pci-e.

The top model of them has 24 sata ports and supports not only common raid levels (0,1,5,10,...) but also raid 6.

Performance should be sufficient.
You can read a extensive review here (already more then a year old, but still a good reference point).

I forget to say that this was a great article!