Thursday, March 26, 2009

DIY Nas: Up and Running!

Well, I intended to blog more about this guy as I was building. I set out with the idea that this system would be a bit more embedded than it turned out. It ended up being a full blown server with 8 hot swap raid bays. It's a Core2 based system and what is pretty fantastic is with the 2.5" system drive running and the NAS drives spun down it consumes a bit over 60 watts measured at the wall. That should improve by another 8-10 watts with some of the new efficient power supplies coming out later this year. It's running Debian and Time Machine backups of two laptops in the house are working like a charm.

2 comments:

TimeFreedom said...

Can you give me the specs on your NAS setup, memory, MB, etc...

Thanks in advance,

TimeFreedom

Rob said...

Yeah, I meant to blog about that but the run down on parts is:
Mainboard: Gigabyte G31M-ES2L
Ram: 4 GB
CPU: Woodcrest 5200 I think
RAID Backplane (x2): Athena Power BP-SAS3141B SAS
RAID card: Highpoint 2680

The raid card was not included when I took this photo. There were 3 nas drives installed, and one 2.5" drive as the system disk. I have bad opinions on the RAID cages and the RAID card I chose. I'll be writing some posts about those. I don't need RAID and wanted to experiment with it. Turns out it is definitely experimental. It has limited chipset support and limited *drive* support. That's right, it doesn't do well with Greenpower wd10eads. I can't spin them down without causing major problems on spin up.