My basic objective was to create a NAS appliance on par with a Buffalo Terastation, meaning the following goals:
- low power (my Terastation runs at 40 watts on average)
- low noise (my Terastation’s fan is actually quite noisy)
- RAID-5 storage
- UPS support (my Terastation doesn’t support USB. It only supports archaic RS-232 communication with the UPS).
- NTP support to keep server clock closely synced to clients.
The additional desires were:
- Easier expansion of total storage by adding additional drives.
- Support for NFS or RSYNC protocols.
- Perhaps hot-swap failover of drives.
The next post will discuss how OpenSolaris stacks up to this list of requirements, and my initial hardware choices.