I’m gonna start this new blog off right and dedicate my first post to my new Solaris based NAS/SAN build with ZFS filesystem. Since this is a home server my goals were the usual low cost/power/noise/heat/etc. For these reasons I chose a smaller mATX server motherboard and a cost effective Core i3-530 CPU combo. This CPU, when paired with the Intel 3420 Chipset on the motherboard, makes use of the ECC memory which ZFS requires.
The 6x 750GB RAID-Z (similar to RAID5) yields 3.3TB usable space. When attached to the LSI 1068e based Dell SAS6/iR adapter that I won on eBay for $25, they write at ~140MB/s and read at ~320MB/s. This build is fully capable of saturating gigabit ethernet, both upload and download.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| OS | Oracle Solaris 11 Express |
| Motherboard | Supermicro X8SIL-F |
| CPU | Intel Core i3-530 |
| RAM | Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 |
| Case | Athena Power CA-SWH01BH8 |
| Disk Adapter | Dell SAS 6/iR PCI-Express x8 SAS Controller |
| zpool (rpool) | 2x (mirror) 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10000 RPM |
| zpool (tank) | 6x (RAID-Z) 750GB Seagate Barracuda ES |
$ pfexec mkfile 20g /tank/speedtest & $ zpool iostat tank 30 capacity operations bandwidth pool alloc free read write read write ---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- tank 2.89T 1.17T 60 7 6.74M 97.4K tank 2.90T 1.16T 1 1.28K 6.60K 138M tank 2.90T 1.16T 0 1.33K 17 144M tank 2.91T 1.16T 0 1.23K 10.8K 133M tank 2.91T 1.15T 0 1.24K 2.70K 130M
$ pfexec dd if=/tank/speedtest of=/dev/null bs=16k count=1000000 & $ zpool iostat tank 30 capacity operations bandwidth pool alloc free read write read write ---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- tank 2.91T 1.15T 60 7 6.74M 127K tank 2.91T 1.15T 2.23K 25 285M 123K tank 2.91T 1.15T 2.50K 0 320M 0 tank 2.91T 1.15T 2.30K 31 295M 167K tank 2.91T 1.15T 2.44K 0 312M 0 tank 2.91T 1.15T 2.39K 30 306M 172K