OK, long time no update, but perhaps some useful information (I hope).
Turn key NAS devices are appliances—like washing machines. NAS gives you a bit more without the overhead (learning curve) of a full-blown server OS. But there is a difference between an appliance device and FreeNAS (or Openfiler or ClearOS)
And with all due respect to Handruin, I think that Openfiler is much harder to learn than FreeNAS, but, and it's a very big butt (think Kim Kardshian butt—and I don't think that is a bad thing) OpenFiler's ability to use memory as cache is a huge plus.
But. There's that word again. FreeNAS has come along leaps and bounds since this thread started. If you've tried it and haven't updated in a while, grab the latest nightly build. The difference in performance OotB is worth it.
My original box was a P
!!! 933 on i810. I was getting ~ 19MB/s (Big B) throughput for read and writes. With later builds, the read throughput went up by a factor of 2, ~38MB/s. Not the same as a dedicated disk, but not bad. Then I started down the performance per watt path.
The Pentium 933 with Gigabit NIC and SATA card with yum cha 150W power supply was pulling ~ 78 Watts at idle. I played around with several configs and settled on a Socket 754 board with a Turion ML-34 (1.8GHz, 1 MB L2 cache) and 1GB RAM. Any of the later revision S754 boards witll support Turion (AMDs mobile chip) out of the box. This little beastie is good for 35W max at 1.35V. I dropped the voltage to 1.2 V (equivalent to an MT model Turion) which is good for 25 W max. Combined with an Antec Earthwatts 380 (80plus Bronze), at idle this rig (same HDD) is good for 49 Watts at the wall (as opposed to 78W). Throughput is in another league—88MB/s (710Mb/s) reads and 37MB/s (300Mb/s) writes. Close enough to a physical hard drive.
Why a 754 rig? It was sitting around, supports mobile CPUs out of the box and the Turion cost AUS$10 landed. Seriously I think AMD has a market for old 754 boards as appliances that it's missing. Almost none of the newer stuff gets under 45W. And this is with a full size ATX board (DFI LANParty 250Gb if your interested), 4x IDE, 4 X SATA, Matrox G450 16GB, 1GB DDR 400. A microATX 754 with integrated video would likely drop the idle power draw by several Watts. Sure you could buy a miniITX board for a few hundred dollars that would draw less power, but it would take a while to pay back the return on investment.
Cougtek alluded to it in an earlier post. Sometimes it doesn't pay to reuse older hardware. Handy is also correct as well. FreeNAS doesn't use more than about 22% of the available RAM, so Openfiler has the edge, but then my figures are obtained with a single drive, not some 6 drive monster array
Would I buy a NAS appliance? No. I backup to another drive on the FreeNAS box every 15 minutes via rsync. And that is mirrored to another computer.
For free software, I'll take it.
