New Year New Updates

Happy New Year to everyone! :)

It has been quite awhile since my NAS project. There are some new hardwares available to recommend to anyone who has a little more budget.

Motherboard: ASRock Rack Mini ITX DDR3 1333 Motherboards C2550D4I

Casing: SilverStone Technology Premium Mini-ITX / DTX Small Form Factor NAS Computer Case, Black (DS380B)

The motherboard support 8 SATA III and 4 SATA II, and 2 gigabit Ethernet port. That is a potential 12 HDD and 2 Gbps.
The casing supports 12 total drives with 8 hot-swappable 3.5" or 2.5" SAS/SATA and 4 fixed 2.5" drives

This is setup is truly awesome.

Some times I think wouldn't it be cool if we can access it from anywhere as long as we have Internet access? Haha. Check out Owncloud and www.noip.com. Have fun people. :)

On other unrelated news, I am starting a new project! Raspberry Pi Powered Quadcopter: dongdongrpiquadcopter.blogspot.com

Project Completed

I put up the system last week. Everything seems to be running fine. 6 * 4 TB drive in RAID-Z2 (RAID 6).

The system draws around ~38 watt idle, peaking at ~78 watt while transferring files. Cool. I think the "green" target is achieved. :)

Shall post some photos and screenshot soon.

Wondering what it could be use for? Haha.

Harddisk purchased

Purchased the remaining 5 4TB hdd today. Shall fix it up tomorrow. Probably will do the testing on weekend.

I decided to go for RAID 6 set up, so total usable storage is 66%, 16TB. My rational for choosing RAID 6 is I have 2 disk for safety. No matter which 2 disk fail, my data remains intact. But if more then 2 spoil, all is lost. As for two RAID 5, even if 3 disk fail, half the data remains intact, but there is a chance that 2 disk fail in the same pool will lose 50% of the data.

I'm back

Gone for 1.5 years. I'm back to wrap up. I'm sorry to whoever is following/reading this blog that I keep disappearing. Have been really busy.

This time round, I am wrapping up everything. Here are some of the things I have done recently.

First, unclocking/unvolting your NAS system needs to be extremely careful. Processor and motherboard degrade gradually over time, so even when a minimum setting that works now, it might not work in the future. I have trouble booting up my system after letting it idle for so long. After debugging for hours, I came to the conclusion that it might be the bios setting. Switched off the undervolting settings, and voila, system all green. If you do not have time, please do not attempt the tweaking. After you define the minimal voltage, put it up 2 or 3 step, to ensure stability.

Second, I got confused in the past when I read Asrock's website regarding 3TB+ unlocker. The software is meant for 32 bit system which has a problem detecting only 2TB from disk greater than 2TB. The motherboard and freenas OS does support disk larger than 2TB. I purchased a 4TB drive, and it worked.

Third, try to avoid 3TB disk. Back then, 3TB disk were newly released in the market, and there are not much information regarding it. After researching about harddisk failure rate, 3 TB have high failure rate. If you don't have a lot of data, purchase 2TB disks, else get 4TB disks.

I will be getting five more 4TB disk and complete my system. The question here is, should I go for 2 separate RAID 5 volume or one single RAID 6 volume. BTW, RAID 50 is a bad idea.

Again, sorry for the lapse in this project. I did a search, my current setup is still available in the market, Hope this will help many DIYer in DIYing their NAS. :)

@To do..

To do:

1. Investigate the problem with the CPU fan
2. Test a 3TB HDD
3. Underclocking/Undervolting (have to install an OS for this)
4. Measure the system's power consumption (before and after underclocking/undervolting)

1) The problem with the CPU fan is due to the motherboard's default settings. I think it is rather strange that the motherboard force the fan to run at 100% speed by default. But well, problem solved.

2) Yet to test.

3 & 4) The numbers are in, but sad to say, undervolting and underclocking doesn't help much. At default settings, the system (minus HDD) as a whole consume 31W at idle. After my attempt to underclock and undervolt, it runs at 29W idle. It seems that the main power draw might not be the CPU, could be the motherboard. Probably I am not doing it right, shall revisit this again.

BTW, previous post showed that my system only have 3.5GB of ram, that is because the MB allocate 512MB to the GPU, I have changed it to 32MB.

A little head up about RAID. One thing that we should keep in mind is that, RAID or no RAID, there is a 100% chance that we might lose our data, and what RAID does is to minimize the probability. One big disadvantage about RAID is that we pool all our data together, if the whole RAID fails, we stand to lose everything. Yes, everything. If you have 5 independent disk, 1 fails, you lose 20% of you data. So is RAID really worth it? I'll leave it to you to decide. If you ask me, RAID is still worth it, but if you have really really important data, backup.

Also, keep in mind that larger disk takes longer to heal, and healing is very stressful for the remaining disks. The system needs to read all the healthy disk in order to re-compute the data/parity and store it to the new disk. 5 disk setup means the healing needs to read 4 disk in order to regain back the data/parity in the lost disk. So if you are planning to use really big drive, 5 or 6 TB, you might want to consider RAID6 (RAIDZ2).

Shall get my HDD soon and wrap up. :)

System All Green

I have fixed up the hardware (less harddisk), seems to be working fine. This is the screenshot of my system.

Click to enlarge

Here is the hardware:

Click to enlarge

I am really happy with the casing, it is really spacious inside, there are plenty of space below the HDD rack (>1 inch), between the PSU and the CPU fan (~2 inch). I am sure that there will be no problem putting another 3.5" HDD under the rack if I want to, and making it into a 7-bay NAS, after all the MB and PSU is capable of handling 7 HDD.

There is a little problem that I noticed immediately, the CPU fan seems to be running at full speed for the whole time. I touched the heat sink after I power down the system, it is cool cold. Probably because I connect the CPU fan power to the wrong port, will look into it.

For my initial test, I attached an old 160GB HDD, everything seems to be fine. Next step, purchase a 3TB HDD for testing.

BTW, I would like to talk a little about the underclocking/undervolting before ending this post. Basically underclocking and undervolting is similar to overclocking, except we are doing it in the "opposite direction". It is a well-known fact that there is a positive correlation between voltage, clock speed and power consumption. The processor is running at 3.6 GHz so there is plenty of room for underclocking and undervolting to reduce power consumption. Because this is an unlocked processor, we can adjust the processor clock without changing the clock speed of other component.

To do:

1. Investigate the problem with the CPU fan
2. Test a 3TB HDD
3. Underclocking/Undervolting (have to install an OS for this)
4. Measure the system's power consumption (before and after underclocking/undervolting)

Getting the hardware.

Things to get:

1. AMD A8-5600K
2. ASRock FM2A85X-ITX
3. Fractal Design Array R2
4. 8 GB RAM

After asking the prices from the stores, there is a little changed in my plan. Apparently the older 5400K processor is still available, and there is at least one store selling it. It is rated at 65W TDP, lower than the 5600K, and is still an overkill for a NAS, and moreover it is cheaper. I decided not to purchase the RAM because the price is just too high, I will just get the RAM from my current desktop.

Things gotten:

1. AMD A6-5400K - $83
2. ASRock FM2A85X-ITX - $165
3. Fractal Design Array R2 - $199
4. 4 GB RAM (from my desktop) - $0

Total Cost: $447. I managed to keep within budget by dropping the RAM. Well, I got the 4GB RAM a year ago at $27, so adding it in, total cost is $474, busting the budget. :(

At this point of time, I still think the decision to choose 5400K rather than 5600K is a good decision. It helps keep project barely within budget, and also gives our "green"criteria a better prospect (I hope.. haha).

A word in advance, project like this always have some risk involved. For my case, my processor may end up consuming so much power that I end up building something else with it rather than a NAS. FreeNAS might not work with my hardware, or in fact none of the OS works, and I end up falling back to Windows. Let me quote what Thomas Edison said, "I did not failed a hundred times, I merely found out a hundreds way that will not work". We just have to learn from our failure and do it better the next time. :)