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Setting up a new NAS device at home

For the last few years, I have been using a couple of Linksys NSLU2 NAS devices coupled with external USB disks for shared storage across my home network. I find that this works quite well to store files from my Mac, Windows, and even FreeBSD machines. One of the NSLU2 is unslung and runs an rsync daemon that I use to save files from my various FreeBSD machines.

The NSLU2 is a nice device, but it had become fairly old (no gigabit ethernet, limited expandability of the software, etc). So I have been meaning to set up a replacement. I have decided to use a Soekris net6501 to build my own little NAS box, using a couple of external 2 TB external drives.

Now, the question is: what software will I run on the net6501? I have been quite tempted by FreeNAS, but FreeNAS 8 has a stated minimum RAM size requirement of 4 GB (with 6 GB listed as the minimum for ZFS usage), and the net6501 is limited to 2 GB RAM (actually, I think that's even a limit of the Intel Atom CPU that it is built upon). FreeNAS 0.7 has a significantly lower RAM requirement, but I am afraid that it will be orphaned, as the main development path for FreeNAS is now version 8.

Of course, I could just set up FreeBSD on the net6501 and be done with it.

Anyway, I still have a few weeks to decide, as I am waiting for a new BIOS release for the net6501, as I am having some issues with the new USB boot code of the Soekris device: if I plug in 2 large (2 TB) external USB disks, in addition to the small internal 8 GB USB key that holds the FreeBSD image, then the device hangs on boot while probing the USB devices. If I just connect the external USB drives after the machine is booted, it works perfectly. I am hoping that the USB probe code will be fixed in the next BIOS release.

Fun for the weekend :-)

/FreeBSD | Posted at 20:06 | permanent link