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. :)