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Aren't NASes fun?

Apart from everything going on at work (and there is a lot to do there), and a fairly significant birthday in mid-week (this is where you find you've got a lot of great friends), I have found some time to play around with my NAS project.

Here's the latest:

1. The HP Proliant Microserver arrived after 2 days. This is really good service from HP France and it comes with a great rebate (33% -- check it out on the HP France website). It is quite nice hardware; well put together. If it's reliable, I'll be very pleased with my purchase.
2. I am moving 3 2TB SATA disks into it. I've installed FreeBSD 9.0 on the machine, and will put the 3 disks in a RAID-Z configuration under ZFS. This will give me a 4TB NAS box that does NFS, CIFS, and rsync (oh, and perhaps Subversion too). This is quite nice.
3. I am finding though that moving Terabytes of information around isn't easy. I am also finding that ext3 filesystem support in FreeBSD isn't great, and neither is ufs support in Linux... both are kind of OK; but in trying to copy 1.8TB of backup from my old NSLU2 onto a couple of external USB drives, I encounter limitations both on the FreeBSD and on the Linux side. Pfffff. My ultimate solution: boot liveCDs onto 2 machines, KNOPPIX on the Microserver, FreeBSD 9 on my main PC, connect the USB 3.0 external drive on the PC, fire up a rsync daemon on the PC, and rsync the data from the disk in the Microserver across the Gigabit Ethernet and onto the PC. It's overly intricate, but it does the job at a good speed and with native FS support on both sides. I will take hours to complete though.
4. I thought I could throw in my HP USB 3.0 PCIe card into the Microserver, but somehow it doesn't work... FreeBSD or Linux see the card; but the USB devices plugged into the ports don't get any power!?! I would venture that the card is fried somehow. Not sure how it happened; though.
5. While doing this, I have also changed the TimeMachine backup disk on an old iMac to a 2.5" disk instead of the 1TB disk it used to have... I'll use the later for backups on on the Microserver.

Anyway, I need some form of USB 3.0 support on the Microserver... 40 MB/s is just too slow.

More on this later.

| Posted at 15:49 | permanent link