Building a low-power FreeNAS Server: Part 3

My FreeNAS Server has been up for a week.

I assembled everything in my parts list and I'm glad to report that all components worked as predicted. I did not have any surprise.

Assembling a homebrew computer is a nice activity for kids. My 7-year old helped me plug all the headers and assemble the case. Counting all the explanations I had to give to him, we were over in a little over 30 minutes.

I then used m0n0wall's physdiskwrite to write an embedded amd64 image of FreeNAS directly on a leftover 1GB flash card I had from an HP tradeshow. Then I plugged it on my USB-header-to-USB-plug thingy directly inside the case. The two hard disks are not used to boot FreeNAS at all; their purpose is only to hold data.

I happen to no longer have any computer screens; I only have laptops at home. So I hooked up the PC to my flat screen TV to configure the BIOS and do the initial FreeNAS configuration.

There are a two things about using a mini-itx desktop board I don't like:

• The Intel Desktop BIOS does not support console redirection (at least I didn't see any mention of this anywhere) so you need to configure it the old way with a screen and a keyboard;
• The built-in video card, needed by the BIOS, cannot be deactivated. Its video memory is, naturally, shared with the system memory and the lowest memory footprint is 128Mb. That ended up taking 10% of the 1Gb of RAM in my server. Not a problem since I'll never need that gig, but a hassle anyway.

But for the price I paid that board, these were things I was ready to live with.

Now I've got a bootable system, and it works well. My next task is to ensure that it consumes the less power possible. I already configured hard disk spindowns but I'll try to see if I can do something with wake-on-lan. More to come later!

Building a low-power FreeNAS Server: Part 2

Part 2 of my series will be a shopping list of the materials I've picked to build by FreeNAS server.

Everything starts with the motherboard. I was looking for a low-power Mini-ITX board that had a built-in gigabit ethernet controller and I've decided to pick an Intel D510MO. This is a desktop board based on the Atom processor which is cheap and low power. There were third-party Atom boards that were maybe 10-15$ less than the Intel-branded one, but some reviewers complained on excessive heat and I didn't want to have heat problems. I was initially looking into the VIA C7 platform but it can't beat the Atom in terms of performance. I still don't know if the intel BIOS built on this board can work on a serial console. That would be surprising, but I will keep you posted.

I purchased two 1Tb Seagate 7200 RPM SATA disks -- nothing special here, except that 7200RPM was an imported factor for me. I want these disks to be as fast as possible when I'm copying large amounts of data.

For the case, I picked a cheap MicroATX one. Why MicroATX? Because Mini-ITX cases are expensive, and usually can't fit more than one hard disk. I selected a R102-P from Rosewill which happened to be 20$ on Newegg. That case is not only cheap, but it can hold 4 hard disks (which doesn't seem too common on MicroATX cases) and the front is very well ventilated with a lot of air holes right in front of the disks.

The case doesn't come with a power supply. And I didn't want to; since I was looking to be the most power-efficient possible, I picked a 80-Plus 250W power supply from Sparkle. 250W for an ATX form factor is also not that common, but I was really looking into getting what I need and not more -- an idling 500W PS consumes more power and one rated at 250W.

The last thing I bought is a gizmo made by Koutech - an adapter that converts a 10 pin USB header into a standard USB plug. Using this, I can put FreeNAS on a small USB key, and plug that key directly on the motherboard inside the case -- no dangling key outside the box. The motherboard doesn't have an IDE header, so I couldn't use a more common IDE to CF card converter. We'll see how this goes.

That's it for now. I'm currently in the process of having all this shipped to me and I will soon see how things work out.

Building a low-power FreeNAS Server: Part 1

I've been looking into having a small file server in my home, to store my photographs and iTunes library. The most important aspects of that file server are, in order:

• Low power requirements: It is on 24/7 and I want don't want to consume too much power
• RAID-1: I want my data to be protected in case the hard disk crashes
  
• Low cost
• Good performance
  
• Expandability: Nice features such as a bittorrent client are a plus, I want to be able to experiment with DLNA in the future, so the "hackability" factor is important.
  

There were two contenders here that met most requirements: DLink's DNS-323 and Synology's DS-210j (Buffalo has some too but they are hard to find online). They each had a drawback: the DNS-323 is reported by many to be subpar in terms of performance, while the DS-210j is expensive.

So I decided to build my own NAS instead. It will most probably be based on FreeNAS, assuming it is hackable enough to my taste. The overall price is below the DS-210j, and I expect performance to be up to my expectations. Low power being paramount, I had to hand pick all the components and my next posts will detail what I've chosen, and how I'll be building it. I'll try to put some nice pictures.

O.