Nick Taylors blog

I’ve done some research over the past few days and have pulled together a component list for building my home-based ZFS NAS server. I’ve made the list available via Google Docs, click here for the full version.

I’ve not had time to jot down my reasoning behind this, but in summary this configuration gives me the capacity I need now, room for future expansion, fits into my rack at home, and is (almost) in budget.

Alright. I’ve had enough.

I’m a reasonably demanding home storage user, I guess I have around 3 TB of data and 4-5 TB of capacity at home. Photos take up close to 1TB, I’ve a lot of my own video, transcoded video, and music.

I’ve tried all sorts of solutions – external drives, Infrant (now NetGear) ReadyNAS, Drobo, etc. They all have their shortcomings. My Drobo, with over a TB of data let go. My ReadYNAS 600 died of old age (it was sad to see it go). Playing with multiple 1TB external drives is fragile and stressful. All of these products (except the ReadyNAS) are black boxes, the most status you get is a green LED or no mounted volume. At least the ReadyNAS has a MIB available, and I’ve used Nagios to monitor my ReadyNAS NV:

I’d also been thinking about failure, and I’ve had controller failures, PSU failures, disk failures; and it occurred to me that even RAID5 may not cut it. It seems I’m not alone in thinking this, and I found that Robin Harris over at storagemojo.com had been thinking this since July 2007. He also thought some more about disk reliability. I also like Joerg Moellenkamp’s presentation about the end of RAID5.

Feeling validated in my concerns, I decided to brainstorm a little and decided I need to have a storage facility to provide the following:

Fast response and transfer time; simply locate it on my GigE LAN at home.
Around 12TB storage, expandable
Rack-mountable
Open Operating System
Very configurable
Monitorable
The ability to support something more reliable than RAID5.
Be affordable, budget around $2k

There’s only one thing that meets all these criteria, I have to build my own ZFS Server.

By the way, fsck is not a rude word!

A while ago I bought a Drobo, the 2nd edition with Firewire 800 as I thought it’d be a nice way to get a could of TB of storage attached to the Mac Pro. A lot of people rave about the Drobo, but I’ve found it to be a disappointment. It seems like a great idea, but I’ve had problems with it.

Firstly, I had a few hundred GB of ISOs that I needed to off-load from some external drives (for temporary storage, I use and recommend the 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F DT HD103UJ, a nippy and (so far) reliable drive with a 3-platter array. Maximum PC has a good review. I combine it with with good looking and performant Icy Dock MB559UEB-1S-B, with USB2 and Firewire 800 interfaces. I moved the ISOs over to the Drobo, after some testing, and of course, after I’d deleted the ISOs from the external drive, the Drobo started playing up.

It would restart a few times a day, and then it would hang occasionally. After leaving it for a while, I’d always have to cycle the power by pulling the PSU lead out from the back. I’d opened a support ticket with Drobo when the thing stopped mounting.

Something clearly had become corrupt, as when I tried to mount the Drobo volume my Mac (both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro), would crash with the black screen. Not good. I used a combination of tools, including Data Rescue II, Techtool Pro, and Disk Warrior 4 – they couldn’t help. At this point I knew Drobo couldn’t help, and as the data was recoverable (albeit in a time-consuming way), I blatted the hardware and drives and put them in a factory default condition. I’ve upgraded the Firmware to v1.3.0, the dashboard to v1.2.4. and guess what, the damn thing is still restarting.

I’ve had it with consumer grade crap. I’m building a ZFS server.

My Mac Pro had suffered from bloat even before I upgraded to Leopard. I performed the simple upgrade, rather than “Archive and Install” or “Erase and Install”. I’ve been in this business enough years to know better! Anyway, after deciding against the expensive option of buying the Apple RAID card and 2 or 4 300GB SAS drives ($600 each!), I simply blatted the boot drive and performed a clean install of Leopard.

Of course, it takes an age to reinstall all your applications and utilities and to get it just the way you want it. I’m mostly back to where I want to be and much happier. Firstly, the system is far more stable and secondly, it’s so much snappier.

Here’s hoping the extra 8GB memory arrives today!

No sooner had I wrote about my ReadyNAS 600 being without problems, the fan fails on me. As both the Infrant and Netgear stores didn’t have the replacement available, and after seeing the posts in this thread I looked at NewEgg and ordered the following:

SILVERSTONE RL-FX121 Case Fan – Retail
NewEgg Item#:N82E16835220002

It cost $16.59 (but about $20 to overnight). It’s a straight swap and fits perfectly.

I’ve never had a problem with my 2 original ReadyNAS 600 devices. The ReadyNAS NV, though, well, it’s not been smooth. I’ve had a couple of drive failures, had to perform a service action and last week the Power Supply failed, with a smoky smell!

Infrant, actually now Netgear, support were great. I’d read a bit of background to the problem on the forums, and they shipped a replacement out the same day. I replaced it today, and it’s still working!

So it’s not too difficult to unlock your iPhone. There’s a 4 step guide here:

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_unlock_OS_X_Part_1

Some more here:

http://iphone.unlock.no/#Step3-Performing-software-unlock 

A couple of extra steps here, if you get “no service” after unlocking:

http://www.djjeffa.com/vb/showthread.php?p=100869

And finally, here’s how to use your own tunes as ringtones (with iTunes 7.4.1)

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_Modding_for_Windows_102#ADDING_A_CUSTOM_RINGTONE

“Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 3. Please replace the failed disk as soon as possible”

The second disk to fail in 5 months – another HDS HDS724040KLSA80 7K400 GB Deskstar. I’m replacing it with a Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (from NewEgg).

I use RAM mounts on the Land Rovers and the motorcycles – I’ve used them for 7 years and never had a problem despite being shaken around off-road and overland. So after buying a Delphi Skyfi3, I naturally wanted a ram mount for it. They didn’t list one in their catalog, so I emailed them and got this response the same day:

We currently do not have a solution for that unit as it does not have a solid way for us to mount our mounts to their factory cradle. We currently do not have any plans to provide a solution for this particular device. If we see a tremendous demand for the Delphi device we may create a solution but we do not have any plans at this point.

Bugger. Still, the factory car mount may be ok but I doubt I’d use it on the bike. I’ll have to see what alternatives are out there.

As I’ve lost a drive in one of my NAS arrays, I need to replace it. The ReadyNAS can handle different types of drive, but will only perform at the capacity and speed of the smallest and slowest drive in the set. As I have 3 good HDS 400 GB drives and 400 GB is a little on the small side, I thought I’d do a rolling upgrade by putting in a bigger drive. So what’s the largest capacity SATA drive available today? It’s the Seagate Barracuda 750 GB one. So, after checking the HCL at Infrant to ensure it’d work with the ReadyNAS, I noticed that there are a couple of models to choose from – even after ruling out the 8 MB cache in favor of the 16 MB version.

Checking out my favorite store for harddrives, ZipZoomFly, I noticed that there’s a difference in price between the 2 models I’m interested in, the ST3750640AS and the ST3750640NS. Now as the Seagate site is down at the moment (I hope that’s not prophecy), I had a quick look at the Hard OCP Forum before heading to the Infrant Forums where I found a good thread explaining the differences.

Basically the NS version handles the additional heat and vibration better than the AS version, and it’s the one Seagate recommends for running in NAS/RAID configurations. So I got one for $320 and it should arrive in a couple of days.