Low Power High Density NAS

[EverydayDiesel]

Hello,

I would like to build a very low powered (maybe atom based) nas that would run linux and samba for file sharing. I would also like to have a hardware raid 5 with 10 6Tb wd red drives.

My delima is the fact that I wish I had a light like on servers

Requirements
1. Low power
2. Must expand to at least 24 drives
3. Rack-mountable
4. Reasonably priced (cant afford storage pod $10k build)
5. Must be notified of drive failures (preferably by red light)

Current hardware
1. 6 - 6tb western digital red drives
2. 2 - 500gb seagates (for OS in raid 1 for redundancy)

I prefer super micro servers but I dont think an E5 Xeon is really needed for this application (electricity usage and also heat)

Thanks in advance.

 

[EverydayDiesel]

bueller.......bueller.....

 

[Terry Kennedy]

bueller.......bueller.....

Very low power and 24 drives is going to be a difficult combination to achieve.

I'd look for something like a Dell PowerVault NX3100 that somebody stripped the drives / memory / CPUs out of and start with that - it is a pretty power-efficient chassis. It supports 12 x 3.5" hot-swap trays + 2 x 2.5" internal trays for a mirrored OS set. Normal CPUs in that box are Xeon 5600 series, usually E5620. You can install whatever you want on it (FreeBSD works, so FreeNAS / Linux / whatever should work as well). The factory default OS was Windows Storage Server 2008.

I got a couple of these (loaded, with 12 x 2TB SAS drives in each) out of a dumpster last year. They idle at around 350W with 14 drives, 2 CPUs, and 24GB of RAM.

For your second 12 drives, you'd use something like a Dell PowerVault MD1200 expander.

Note that both the NX3100 and MD1200 have SAS RAID controllers, but they are perfectly happy talking to SATA drives. The controller(s) will complain about non-Dell-certified drives, but (with recent firmware) they'll still talk to them.

If you're going to roll your own, look at my RAIDzilla II writeup for some ideas. Note that my zilla's are quite expensive for what you get, at least as a home-built solution - mostly-identical hardware sells for a lot more from commercial vendors, as mentioned in my article.