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By Johnny, September 5, 2011 1:07 am

Those that work with me or know about my weird obsession with backing up my data and building file storage solution servers will be glad to know that I’ve finally broke the the 1TB mark last month. I’ve finally decided to step up and build a big boy network attached storage (NAS) box. I actually considered buying a Drobo and popping a couple of drives and call it a day. But after helping a friend configure her Drobo, I found the software available for additional features being very lacking for my needs. It was also a pain in the a#$ to configure and relied on the fact that you need special Drobo client software to complete some of the that configuration.

Around the same time, I had helped my brother-in-law build his own NAS box with the extra machine that was lying around at my home. I decided to install FreeNAS 0.7.2 which I’ve played around briefly a few months back. The main reason I went with this version was that it had the ability for him to host movies, pictures, and music files using uPNP (Universal Plug N’ Play) so that he can stream his personal content from the NAS box to his PS3.

For my own purpose, I was thinking about replacing my current file server solution which consists of a Slackware 12.2 server which runs my Samba share for Windows, Fuppes for uPNP for my XBox 360, and LAMP server for my personal Wiki pages. The server contains a 20GB root drive, 250GB mirrored RAID 1 drives, and an externally attached 500GB mirrored RAID 1 drives. It is my primary backup server which serves up movies, photos, & music to the rest of my network. I’ve used up about 80% of my storage on this existing server so far so I think it was a perfect time to think about expanding out. With the possibility of using hardware that was more powerful, energy efficient, and quiet was very appealing.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to do a complete replace of the existing system. The software that I chose to run my NAS box is FreeNAS 8.0. This is the next generation of the software which is primarily built on the ZFS file system. ZFS is a fairly knew concept in which the software uses your hardware and create virtual devices and then device pools to manage your storage needs. It allows you to expand your storage needs similarly to how Drobo does it. This is a huge requirement for my next file server in which it needs to be expandable. I don’t want to go through the trouble of backing things up and replacing hardware and restoring from that backup. The downside of this software is that I lose functionality to share my media to my XBox 360 since uPNP was not available. I’ll also lose LAMP for my Wiki. The only way around this is to add my new build to my server farm of 2.

I carefully picked out my list of parts for the build. I started with four 2TB green drives from Western Digital (WD). I’m usually very hesitant in using WD as my drives but the years that I haven’t been keeping up, Seagate’s quality seem to have withered while WD has made great strides in the large capacity drives. From there I ordered the rest of my system which featured the following items:

• Asus E35M1-I micro ITX motherboard with a passively cooled AMD Dual Core E-350 processor
• 8GB G.Skill RipJaw 4GB x 2 Memory Kit
• Lian-Li PC-Q08 mini tower case which has 6 internal hard drive slots
• Antec 380W ATX power supply
• Verbatim 4GB Store ‘n’ Stay USB Drive

Stay tuned for Part 2 which will explain the build in detail.

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By Johnny, June 18, 2011 2:12 am

I must be a psychic or extremely lucky! After giving away my desktop that I’ve been using for about 1.5 years to my brother-in-law so that he can roll his own FreeNAS server, my RAID 1 hard drive enclosure decided to throw errors in which I was no longer able to access the video files from the mount on the file server. I ran some diagnostic tools and found that one of the drive was not responding well. Perhaps a bad sector or what not.

As if the hard drive Gods gave me a gift, I have the yanked out hard drive sitting on my coffee table for the entire week. Through-out the week, I was figuring what I should do with the extra 500GB but it become more apparent when my 500GB disk array became at risk. I quickly swapped the hard drive out of the tray. The amazing part was that as soon as I popped the drives back in, the enclosure immediately knew what to do to recreate the copy without me doing anything. Apparently, this works because the enclosure checks the timestamp on both disks and the newest one will have their data mirrored. Amazingly enough, the disks were the same exact model and size.

So after I let the enclosure do it’s thing in generating a mirrored drive, I was back in business the next day. I quickly mounted the enclosure back and voila! My data was back and it was redundant again.

I can’t say how glad I am to have a fully redundant data storage system. Big kudos to DAT Optic’s ezRAID enclosure. They really work!