1st NAS

I'm building my first home NAS system using Openfiler.  The box I have chosen is the Dell PowerEdge 600SC, straight from ebay!

It has 256mb memory, 4 64bit PCI slots, and 1 32bit PCI slot.

I will be installing an Adaptec AAR-2410SA card in one of the PCI-X slots.  It is a 4-port SATA card supporting RAID 0,1,5.  I haven't decided which RAID environment yet... Leaning toward RAID 0 for maximum capacity.  Then, I may build a second NAS that will be a mirror of the first NAS.  I really hate losing data!

The box also has a 1gb NIC on the motherboard and I'm adding a second 1gb NIC, HP Groadcom NC7771 PCI-X.

I'm thinking I will go with four of the 2TB Seagate Barracuda drives.

I now see from the specs on Openfiler that I need more memory.  Currently bidding on 2GB of memory!  Wish me luck!  Won!  Should be here in a few days.

The server is here.  Installed:

SATA Card

NIC Card

20GB Hard drive

Everything seemed to configure without a hitch.  I partitioned the hard drive and installed OpenFiler.  I was able to login the control console and access OpenFiler from another PC using the web interface.  I can ping both NIC's but I can only access the web interface through the NIC on the motherboard. That's strange.  Also, the fan is really loud.  Sounds like a jet plane idling on the runway!

Still waiting for:

4 - 2TB hard drives

2 - IDE power coard Y splitters

5 - SATA cables

2 - 1gb Memory cards

Ok, the problems have started.  Memory didn't fit.  I went to crucial and it listed the memory as PC2700 333mhz.  So, I went to EBAY and bought a stick, cheap.  Doesn't work.  The machine has PC2100R 133mhz memory in it.  I also looked up the support tag and the machine shows to have been built using 266mhz memory.  So, back to EBAY and I bought 4gb of PC2100R 266mhz memory.  I installed it and the machine is happy!

Next problem is the SATA array card.  The Adaptec AAR-2410SA card doesn't like the 2TB drives.  Looks to only support 1TB drives...  :(

So, I did a littler research and I ordered a new card.  Addonics 4-port RAID5/JBOD SATA II PCI controller. 

I Installed the Addonics card and it looks really good.  I setup Raid-0, creating an 8TB array, and re-installed Openfiler .  Openfiler sees the drives as 4 independent drives, so I created 4 LVM partitions, created a group volume, and allocated the 4 drives to the group.  Everything seemed to be great until I rebooted,  lost all the data, and had to re-setup the group volume to get everything working again.  I went back to bios and removed the Raid-0 array and had it stay as 4 independent drives.  Re-installed Openfiler and basically went through the same process and got the same results when I re-boot.  Everything got screwed up!

Ok, I have decided to load Freenas and see if it works better.  It installed fine and to get the 8TB to come online, I had to create a software array.  Seemed to work great, until I re-booted!  The software array stopped and won’t restart!  Freenas will allow me to setup the four 2TB drives independently and this seems to work and stay good through a reboot.  So, everything is working well, but I now have four 2TB volumes instead of one 8TB volume.  I can live with this!  J

So, I’ve ended up with:
     Dell Poweredge 600SC
     4gb Memory
     1 2GB IDE Drive (Boot)
     8TB Disk
     1 gigabit NIC
I disabled the onboard NIC.