Categories
NAS OpenSolaris

Goals for my NAS Project

My basic objective was to create a NAS appliance on par with a Buffalo Terastation, meaning the following goals:

  1. low power (my Terastation runs at 40 watts on average)
  2. low noise (my Terastation’s fan is actually quite noisy)
  3. RAID-5 storage
  4. UPS support (my Terastation doesn’t support USB.  It only supports archaic RS-232 communication with the UPS).
  5. NTP support to keep server clock closely synced to clients.

The additional desires were:

  1. Easier expansion of total storage by adding additional drives.
  2. Support for NFS or RSYNC protocols.
  3. 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.

2 replies on “Goals for my NAS Project”

Hi Mark, how is the project going 34 days on?

My LinkStation (didn’t have the $$ for Terra at the time) is just about full so I’ve been doing extensive research over the last few days. I’ve always wanted my NAS to do more for me. Currently I’m stuck with leaving an old computer on to serve my Roku and my TiVo. I realise that I could try to hack one or both of these functions into the Linkstation itself… However, with the Linkstation holding the backup of all my irreplacable data I’m not about to fool about on that level.

So all my reading is pointing me towards ZFS on commodity x86 gear in a small/quiet/cool case. I’m leaning towards Solaris with their integrated CIFS and because their ZFS implementation is going to be the first with any new fixes or features.

I haven’t dug into the OpenSolaris hardware compatibility list yet so I’m dying to see what you’ve chosen. I’ll be subscribing to the RSS of your blog at home.

-Owen

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.