NASLite Network Attached Storage

Anyone have any ideas as to where one would source these? I am mainly concerned about power supply failures, but I would really love to find a cheap P3 board and install it in a 9-bay chassis.

I suppose I could continue with the regime that I have been in acquiring older Dell P3's and purchasing an extra power supply to leave on the rack.

In doing some research, I found that NEWegg still offers P3 boards for sale. (3) ISA slots and (4) PCI slots. Who would have thought that I would ever see ISA again?

PC Pitstop offers a 9-bay enclosure and Icy-Dock allows you to stuff (5) drives into a (3) bay 5.25" internal drive enclosure, so this will give me my final count of 15-drives, (3) Tb RAID 5 arrays without hot spares. SWEET

Still need to do power requirement calculations on this. I figure I will build insanely large now, that way I won't have to worry about it for years.

What fills up my servers the quickest is ripping mp3 streams.

A C3 board may be a much better option instead of a P3 board. The VIA C3 CPU is low power and runs very cool as compared to an Intel or AMD. The benefit of going that route is the peripherals and associated bus are usually high speed.

The cost is low due to the poor performance of such boards in desktop machines, however their utility as NAS boards is ideal.

The ASUS Terminator C3 barebone boxes are under $100 and only need drives and RAM. Another good option is the PC CHIPS M789CG, which goes for about $50 with the CPU.

The VIA Epia boards are ideal, but pricey at $100 for essentially the same hardware as the M789CG.

Take a look at those and see if they are a better fit for what you are doing.

Hello Tony:

Thanks for the comments. My concern with total power consumption is not much an issue, my concern was making sure I purchase a large enough PSU to handle everything thing in the end. I know that there are 1-kW PSUs available, but if I do not need one that large then perhaps 800 watts would suffice, I do not know as of yet.

The ASUS C3 board is nice but not sufficient for my needs, I will need more then one PCI port. However, given that I take that board and find a small 1U enclosure with a few SCSI/SATA drives may work. Hmmmmm..

The M789 is nice as well, (1) LSI MEGA and (1) GA311 another hmmmm..

I will save these for future options, I need to build a larger server for the office and want to do it in 1-3U frame if possible.

Thanks again..

You can run a C3 chip in a Socket 370 board also. Plenty of options there.

Figure 20 Watts per drive on spin up ane around 125 Watts for the MB on full tilt. That's about 425 Watts worst case on power up. Figure that when the machine is just running and read/writes to drives it should be no more than 250 Watts. I would get a good 500 Watt power supply and call it there.

Also, a hot spare is a very good idea with an array of that size. I would even say a must. I will not even build arrays of that size without a couple of hot spares in the pool for a customer. Drives fail and the more drives there are the better the chances of a failure.

Mike

i have been reading review notes on RAID cards for a while now. Where this is of relevance is that i see that some cards support sequential spin up of drives i can only presume to lessens the power load spike on a server booting.

With 15 drives, RAID6 is advised.

Agreed but most cards do not support RAID6 yet and those that do cost more than most of us can afford. Add to that that they are likely not even supported in NL and it becomes a non issue. RAID50 would be a better interum choice.

Mike

Thanks for the input, I have been looking at a few other RAID options as well, RAID 10 and RAID 50.

Hot spares are something that I have considered; at the office on the Dell 1800 I have (6) 300gb scsi320 drives two of which are hot spares.

The LSI raid in the 1800 does support sequential spin-up, not sure on some of the others cards I have been looking at; will make a note on the nonetheless., thanks.

Since my last posting I have found 12-bay enclosures, so that may be an option however I still need a PCI slot to accommodate the GA311.

Now next comes the issue of what would I do with (3) VERY large arrays?

The first would would be the main depository for anything and everything.

The second array would handle backups of the first one via either Acronis or rsync, (still have to investigate this) and also store backups for other machines on the LAN.

Third array I have not decided on what to use it for.

So... #1 File Server...#2 Backup Server...#3 Unsure

Question: Tony, or anyone else for that matter. I have been looking for VIA C3 cpu's and they are rare to find. Anyone know of some sources?

could you share some links on your research as there will be a few interested parties

This is one of the enclosures that I did find. Serendipitously, I discovered that this Norco enclosure has built in SATA port multipliers, which I am not entirely sure if it would function with NASlite, the guide did mention linux.

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/ ... orco/1220/

Bear in mind I was just looking at the enclosure and the function of port multiplication is outside of scope and relevance of my ultimate goal.

For those however interested:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=n ... multiplier

Some more 12-bay enclosures:

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/images/Picture%203.png
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosur ... ta12rm.asp

I was also looking on LIAN-LI website and they have a nice aluminum enclosures that has: 5.25" bay x 7, 3.5" x internal x 5

So you could stuff two 5-drive raid arrays, using a ICY-Dock drive enclosure up front and another raid array internally, while still leaving room for a CD-ROM drive.