ZFS Home Server - (Part 1) - Motivation and Planning

Motivation

My existing server consisted of an aging AMD socket A machine running linux with about 6 disks.

Pros of this setup:

  • Cheap hardware
  • I am very familiar with linux and have no trouble fixing anything that goes wrong with the simple debian installation
  • It was easy to pull a disk out of the server and pull data off with my desktop

Cons of this setup

  • Unreliable old desktop hardware
  • Lots of wasted disk space (movies disk full while documents disk has space)
  • NO REDUNDANCY
  • No way to detect bit rot until it is too late
  • Lots of old PATA disks

 

Time for a New Server

 I decided that it was not worth trying to do an incremental upgrade since the hardware was getting old and it would be far easier to future proof by buying all new hardware.

Requirements:

  • Use reliable server hardware
  • Run quietly
  • Be relatively power efficient
  • Share files out via SMB
  • Be simple to set up and manage
  • Be able to notify me about hardware failure and take action without my intervention
  • Provide me with one large storage volume
  • Be simple to add capacity
  • Not cost a lot of money

Thats a pretty tall order to fill for any storage system, let alone a DIY setup.

Options

  • Linux server using mdadm to manage a RAID5
  • Linux server with a hardware RAID controller to do RAID5
  • Windows Server 2008 with a hardware RAID controller (just kidding, this never crossed my mind)
  • Some flavor of Solaris using ZFS to manage disks