Major geekery alert!
I have 2.1TB of hard drive space in my Mac Pro, and 1.5TB in my external Lacie drives. However, there is no redundancy built in. No RAID5 if you know what I mean. If one of those drives fails, then I’ll lose what’s on it, unless I have a backup.
I have backups of my main drive (system, user files, music, photos), via Time Machine, which has saved my ass twice already, but my other media (mainly movies and TV shows) on a specific drive would be lost if that drive failed. My 1TB Lacie drive has started making funny noises, and Firewire on the Mac is a bit dodgy I think. Or my drive is already dodgy - always unmounting and remounting.
So, I’m going to build a home fileserver. I’m just going to follow those instructions and use ZFS on OpenSolaris.
Why ZFS?
Stolen directly from the link above - mainly:
- Simple administration
- Ability to create large, redundant data storage pools with one command
- Built-in data scrubbing to enable ZFS to self-heal ‘latent failures’ (bit rot etc)
- Is designed upon the assumption that disk hardware should never be trusted, so solid checksumming, transactions are used
- Designed to use cheap, commodity SATA disks, not expensive SAS disks
- RAIDZ1 can survive 1 drive failure, RAIDZ2 can survive 2 drive failures
- Failed disks can be replaced and substituted with one command (if no hot spares are available)
- ZFS data pools can be shared via NFS, Samba/CIFS and iSCSI
- Sun Solaris OS and ZFS are free and open source
So I just bought some hardware:
- Cheapo Intel CPU
- Cheapish Intel motherboard with built in graphics and 8 SATA ports
- 4GB DDR2 800 RAM
- Cheap DVD reader
- 160GB SATA drive for the OS
- 3 x 1TB Hitachi SATA drives
- Corsair 550W VX power supply
- Coolermaster 690 case with space for 9 drives
Total cost was HK$9500, with $4700 of that being the 3 1TB drives. If I went AMD and 4 x 640GB drives, I could have got the system for about $7000, but I couldn’t find the AMD motherboards supported by OpenSolaris and with enough SATA ports. So, it was a little more expensive that I had hoped. It better work!
So, this evening, I will mainly be geeking. Installing OpenSolaris, setting up the zfs pool and filesystem, then sharing it over the network and auto mounting it on my Mac. Then I need to transfer all my files.
Very interesting.
Why do you need 160Gb for the OS disk? Or is that the smallest size they come these days?
How will you then access the files, do you just plug it into your Mac or PC?
Yeah, smallest I could find. I’ll use the space for something though.
Will share the files via NFS, then in Mac Leopard, you can set it to automount an NFS share on boot. Then it just looks like another drive attached to your computer. Going to try running it through the router. If that doesn’t work, then plug it straight into my Mac via gigabit ethernet.
Good luck getting OS X to automount NFS on boot on. AFP works better but I doubt that Solaris supports it.
You’d be better off running your favorite Linux with ext3 and looking for HPF or AFP support. Or SMB. NFS is going to be a headache if you aren’t a Solaris admin.
ZFS may be the future but that future isn’t quite here yet.
NFS automounts just fine. There is an app called Directory Utility. set it up in there and it auto mounts.
Well I’m still having a lot of problems with OpenSolaris, going to tery a few more things. If no good, then will go for Linux.