If I don't count the SATA drives (since all the NAS boxes usually came in without drives too) I'll be able to show you that this homemade NAS box is costing only 358.83€.
Qnap TS 459 Pro+ costs 834,90€ and Synology DS-411+ costs 629,90€ at Materiel.net at the time I'm writing those lines. Those devices are the ones I was thinking about to buy and it was also Didier's or Kendrick's choice for their home labs. Didier and Kendrick are fellow bloggers which I appreciate and I'm not saying that those NAS devices aren't the right choice, but I just wanted to show a low cost version of VMware Home lab, since not everybody is rich enough to possibly put €1000 to a dedicated NAS device. And I wanted also experiment a bit … -:) and trying to bring the costs for the NAS box as down as possible.
I might not get the performance of a commercial NAS box but it does not matter, I can still recycle the box later for a home theater or Archive/backup destination box if I want to or Windows SMB storage box.
That's all for the introductory hardware part. See you in next part where I'll do the assembling the pieces together and installing the solution.
[seriesposts title=”The whole project:” listtype=ul order=ASC show_date=0]
Vladan – bit more expensive but the HP MicroServer – http://bit.ly/fUALJU – is a great lab box for this use. Has an internal USB slot that I run Nexenta from, and can take 4 caddy’s of disks plus a cdrom or cold-swap drive!
Pretty interesting how mdadm has superior performance to FreeNAS. I’d be interested to see how OpenFiler compares to mdadm. For my virtual lab I decided that performance was a must and opted for hardware raid. It’s a pretty notable performance upgrade for my systems compared to what software raid in FreeNAS/Openfiler was providing me. Perhaps I should try mdadm/ubuntu with my system and see what I get.
Sorry to reply so late gus….
Yes, the HP micro server…. It might be interesting too…
The Openfiler’s performance is deceiving. I really wish they update to 3.0 to see if it’s get better..
Hey and thank you for a very nice site, very good guides!
The reason for me writing is that i also have a esxi running using ghettoVCB script for backup to (at the moment) a opensuse running as a NFS server. The problem is that some files exceeds 250 GB when backing up making it hard to delete fast enough for script to follow, I could do som changes to the script but I also wanted to make sure that i had the best system (distro), i cant find any conclusion to your little project on which system you would prefer as NFS for esxi 4
regards Allan
This is excellent post sir… I am also building my home lab, but confused on processor… Pls suggest which is best processor for Vmware, Vsphere & Exchange2010…
Hello.
What about performance?
I am just collecting prices and information, and I worry regarding it.
Comments will be much appreciated.
Thanks.
Good article. I was looking into NAS solutions myself earlier this year. I eventually went with a Thecus 4100PRO as I was able to find it at an extremely attractive price. Life led elsewhere for a bit, so unfortunately it’s been delegated to mass storage while I get my other systems back up. It’s slower but may be a good option for those just starting out, and is VMWare certified. For those looking around, I’d also consider some of the higher end Buffalos or possibly Netgear.
Good idea on the DIY project; I hadn’t considered it and might give me an excuse to buy my first Atom system.