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.

My 1997 NAS D90 still had it’s original ICE system in place. It was basically a Clarion head-unit with a 6-disk CD changer. It also has a factory-fitted amplifier driving 4 speakers. Now, I don’t use CDs (except to rip them once), and the changer takes up room in the center console. Plus I was using a pretty awful cassette-tape connector to listen to my iPod/iPhone when driving. After much research I ordered an Alpine iDA-X100 – the revised version of their first “iPod only” head-unit, the iDA-X001.

I decided to keep the factory amp and speakers, the amps is fine and I’ll replace the speakers this summer. That meant connecting the new head-unit to the existing wiring. Now, I’m not going to hack a factory wiring-harness unless I have to so I managed to get a harness that was close enough to work.

As the 1997 D90 was the only year with this configuration, I had to figure out what each on the pins on the factory harness was for. There was some documentation on the web (1, 2, and a useful 3), but I also had to add connectors to the custom harness so it would work with the factory harness. The Alpine unit came with its own unterminated harness, and good documentation (PDF link), it was easy to connect to my wiring.

The pinouts look like this: (click though for large version)

The pinouts for the 10-way connector are for the speakers and self-explainatory. The pinouts for the 8-way connector are as follows:

(Pin 1 is the top left, above the keyed part of the connector, pin 2 is below pin 1, pin 3 is to the right of pin 1, etc.)

1. Phone Mute – not used
2. Amp Trigger
3. Remote – not used
4. 12V+
5. Remote antenna – not used (power for an electric antenna)
6. Illumination
7. ACC – 12V+ switched
8. Ground

Once I had my wiring adaptor cabled, it connected to the factory harness and the x100 works like a dream! Highly recommended.

From Crutchfield, I ordered the following components:
Alpine iDA-X100 Head-unit
Alpine KCE-422i high-speed cable for iPod/iPhone
Receiver Wiring Adaptor for Land Rover
Antenna Adapter

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.

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.