Building a NAS with OpenSolaris and ZFS

A few weeks ago I have finally made the big step and built my own NAS with OpenSolaris using the ZFS file system. The main reason for this was the hassle of having multiple USB hard disks for redundancy purposes and also the relatively poor performance of USB 2.0. In the course of the decision process I had looked into the NAS systems that are available off-the-shelve. But they were either too slow or too expensive. If you want proper speed and resilience against hardware failure you pretty soon end up with systems that are 500+ Euros without any hard disk. And those are still somewhat inflexible. Of course they have the advantage of relatively low power consumption and special-purpose cases with mostly hot-swappable drives. In my case neither was relevant because I am the only person using it and the system is running only when my main machine is up.

When looking into the possible solutions I quickly realized that I want ZFS. It’s reliable, easy to set up, has fantastic features and does not require a hardware RAID controller (which alone saves you about half a grand). There is a ZFS module available for Linux but at the time people seemed to agree that it was in its infancy (relatively speaking). So it was down to FreeNAS and OpenSolaris. There were performance issues with FreeNAS (a known problem at the time), so I decided to go for the reference implementation, which of course meant Solaris. Interestingly, FreeNAS has recently announced to switch to Debian instead of FreeBSD and will therefore cease to support ZFS in the future.

There is bunch of great stuff on the net for exactly my use-case and I recommend you use your favourite search engine to find out more about the details. The one place that really stuck out was and still is Simon Breden’s blog. Make sure to check it out!

For those interested here is my setup:

  • 5* 1 TB WD Green configured as RAID-Z2 (equiv. RAID-6) with 2.8 TB net capacity
  • Asus M3A78-CM with AMD Athlon II X2 250
  • 8 GB ECC RAM
  • Intel® PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter (OpenSolaris did not work reliably with the built-in NIC)
  • Case Tacens Prior M

I have not really done any performance tuning so far and get around 55 MB/sec using CIFS server (not Samba). Neither have I used FTP or NFS so far (solely for lack of time). For those that have only worked with Linux before, be advised that Solaris is sufficiently different to greatly increase the time needed to set up things. Nevertheless I think it was the right decision and gives me a pretty flexible system.

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