Comments on: My NAS Server 1

By: Iain

Iain — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:37:17 +0000

“…4 on-board SATA ports. Using 5 x 4-port SATA cards, I gained a total of 24 SATA ports.”

All the ports have a small extension to make the socket external.

By: ryan

ryan — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:54:17 +0000

Can anyone tell me how he has got 24! drives on that, is it a modified pc or what ?

By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:25:24 +0000

I think unRAID is good in that respect as it’s more flexible, and as far as I can tell produces the same results as RAID 5.

You’re right about the capability of ZFS, but I disagree about not needing to grow a RAIDZ.

If for example you create a RAIDZ device with 4 disks, but are happy with the redundancy RAIDZ provides with using 6, you don’t have the option to add them later when you need them and they are cheaper.

By: jason

jason — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:00:23 +0000

Thanks for the write-up.
I think I’ve had the same experience as you concerning getting large server cases with space for many HDDs into the UK: the prices are extortionate!

Anyhow, just a few things:

1) My understanding of UNRAID is that there is no redundancy. It goes against the philosophy of the solution really. It provides some level of protection by having a parity drive, but that’s not the same as have redundant data or a disk. It allows data recovery in the event of a failure by calculating the values of the lost data.

2) ZFS has supported growing the size of pools (not raidz devices) since inception AFAIK. You can’t grow the size or a raidz device, but normally you wouldn’t need to: that device would be part of a pool and if you need more space you just add more disks (or raidz devices, or mirrors etc) to that pool.

I’ll soon be going this way myself. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately and will probably go with ZFS running on FreeNAS or NexentaStor which will allow me hot spares.

Thanks for the post!