ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

A lot of comments have been logged asking for an entry/ low-end storage DIY guide. The purpose of this guide is to provide a solution for a system with 2-6 drives which is more robust than a simple 1-2 drive NAS system sold by many vendors. Unlike the higher-end and mid-range builds, this guide will optimize for cost of initial purchase as well as power consumption. It will be assumed that these systems are only running one operating system in a bare metal installation (i.e. these will not be virtualized systems). Read the full story

Having recently published the high-end home/ small business December 2010 buyer’s guide, I received a lot of feedback requesting items for the mid and low-end guides. The mid-range I define as a minimum of six drives in the system with a maximum of fourteen drives. Anything more than fourteen drives and getting a 4U storage chassis becomes cost effective. Furthermore with only one add-in or onboard 8-port controller to handle 7-14 drives this seemed like a strong cut-off point. Read the full story

Recently I decided I wanted to reach documents and media stored on my WHS and NexentaStor-ZFS based NASes from my Apple iPad. I have flown about 100,000 miles this year so I am oftentimes far from my NAS. While WHS would provide a solution through its sleek web interface for downloading documents to the iPad, I looked at a few different solutions, and finally have find something that works very well. Read the full story

A constant question I am asked is what is a good NAS build for various usage scenarios. Based largely on my experiences with things like The Big WHS and reviewing other components for this site, I have put together two power-user builds below that provide a strong starting point for someone looking to build a 20+ drive home or small business server. One thing that I learned is that building twice is generally more expensive than purchasing an end-state build up front so the below does not represent the absolute least expensive build possible. Instead, I tried to configure two machines that are cost optimized using quality components. Read the full story

After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.

Read the full story

To install FreeNAS in a Hyper-V virtual machine one needs to do some configuration of the virtual machine, just as one would with a physical machine. Allocating hardware resources is much easier in Hyper-V versus physical machines because you can do it remotely through screens instead of physically taking a box offline and installing hardware. This guide will show the basic Hyper-V virtual machine setup for installing FreeNAS, an open source NAS appliance based on FreeBSD.

Read the full story