1 is A | 2 is B

That was the goal at least. This is really an article about when to give up on old hardware (atticware). It’s amazing how injecting a bit of money into a project can really increase the stability and usability of the computers involved. But let’s start at the beginning.

I really hate backing up systems; especially after I started to have multiple machines with their own specific backup needs. The solution I came up with was having a network attached storage (NAS) appliance at Raid 5 on my network which through using NFS and an fstab entry can be mounted at boot in all my machines. This not only allows all of my data to be available at any machine I happen to be using, but I also have the stability of Raid 5 which means if I have a disk die, I can just replace it — no restoring, no lost data.

The Plan

A NAS device is just a computer (or embedded system) that is optimized for disk capacity and network connectivity. There are some great operating systems out there that can serve as dedicated NAS or you can modify a barebones linux install to achieve the same results in a more roll-your-own fashion.

I decided to keep it easy on myself and choose to use FreeNAS which is built on the FreeBSD and m0n0wall platforms. The advantages are an easy to use web interface for all configuration, small foot print, and great documentation. I recommend looking into it for your own NAS project.

As the title of this article suggests, I wanted to build this NAS on a shoestring. This meant putting the hardware budget on a diet. Basically I was going to only spend money on new disks for the Raid 5 array, the rest of the setup would be atticware, and as close to free as possible. This made for some interesting results…

The Results

What I ended up with was fondly known as Godzillab0x by my friends. I called it Grace. It was built around a salvaged K6-2 box at something like 500MHz. I put some extra SDRAM I had laying around into it to bring it up to 256Mb. Not a bad box all things considered, taking into account that it’s whole job would be filesystem management and networking. I used an old 2Gb HD for the controller (where FreeNAS would be installed, as opposed to the storage disks in the Raid array) and a CDROM that I found laying around. Everything booted and was stable: so far so good.

One note, the pictures don’t quite do it justice because I have been slowly disassembling the box and some of it’s “features” are thus not in the pictures. I knew I needed to write this article before the whole thing was repurposed.

Now for the big discs. At the time I was making it, 250Gb disks were the cheapest at about $50 a disk (that’s $0.20 per Gb). While this was good for the budget it also meant I had to find space, IDE buses, power, and cooling for 5 additional drives in the minitower. So let’s look at the issues one at a time:

• Physical Space
  The case has 2 external five inch bays and two internal three inch bays. The fives where used for the controller and CDROM, so I was still missing 3 hard drive bays. So what I did was salvage a cage from another old case and fit it into my case below the existing bays. This solution seemed to work pretty well.
• IDE Buses
  The board that came with the computer had two IDE buses. One was used for the CDROM and controller, so again I was missing a bus and a half. This time a PCI IDE card came to the rescue. I knew I would be doing raid in software so I only used the card to give me the additional buses I needed.
• Power
  This was one of the bigger problems since no atticware was ever shipped with a power supply larger than 350W. In a delirious fever I decided the solution to this was to use two power supplies in the case. I didn’t even pretend to be able to fit the second supply inside the case, opting instead to leave it on the top. Power supplies generally will not run if they are not plugged into a mother board. Most can however be tricked by jumping a couple pins together on the motherboard plug (this took some experimenting for this supply. I think it was from a very old computer). The second problem I was running into was if the two supplies did not start simultaneously it would cause instability in hard drives (no i don’t know why). This was solved by plugging the two power cables into a surge protector and using the power-strip’s power switch as the switch for the computer.
• Cooling
  Small case + 6 HD’s + 2 power supplies = some significant heat. How I fixed this was a little bit of case mod. The case originally did not have any case fans…not even a CPU fan. So in a situation like this when you are faced with a very elegant design, you must cut huge holes, and mount loud 120mm fans into the case. This will help with the Godzillabox identity and it also dropped 10 degrees off my drive temperatures.

So the results of all this work? I could get the computer to run at 500Gb in Raid 5 but could never get it stable at the full 1Tb. It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that a system this completely hacked should not be stable. The total I spent on the project was between $250 and $300.

The Revised Plan

After months of work with no joy, I was feeling like a failure. However, something magical occurred: I got a job. More importantly, with a real pay check I was able to put some actual money into this project. It is amazing what a little bit of money can do for hardware stability issues.

First of all, I needed a computer that could actually handle large disks. I bought a bare bones system from my favorite components pusher Tiger Direct (oh yeah, give daddy his fix….oh baby). I think I got a steal for about $150: Pentium D dual core, 1Gb DDR2, 4 SATA buses, 600W power supply and a slick looking case with plenty of drive bays. I spent a few more dollars on some super quite 120mm fans (two for the case, one for the CPU) and we were cooking with gas. I used the same setup of a CDROM and small controller hard drive on an IDE bus. If I were to do it again however I think I would use a fast flash card and a flash to IDE converter.

Now for disk: since I now had 4 SATA ports, I figured I should probably use them. I went with 3×500Gb Seagate barracudas. This was more expensive but I think a better investment. If I need to ever upgrade, I can easily go to 1.5Tb before looking into PCI to SATA cards.

The Revised Results

I am very happy with the results (This “Grace 2.0″ is called Pearl). The machine purrs like a kitten and easily saturates my network transfer capability. Infact I could upgrade my network to gigE and still saturate it. I use it with NFS, and a line added to the fstab of all my machines. This approach is so seamless and easy it makes me cry a single tear of joy. This approach to the NAS was slightly more expensive with a final total of close to $500. However, I must point out that while Grace the Godzilla may have been half as expensive, it took me probably ten times the amount of time as Pearl to set up and ultimately failed. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, I’m just asking if it’s worth it.

Conclusion

I’ll answer my own question, Yes they both were worth it. I learned equal amounts working on both Grace and Pearl. The conclusion I would like to make is that hardware hacking is a lot of fun and often a good first step in a project: it is cheap which means you won’t ruin your expensive equipment. It give you more excuse to play and experiment. However, when it comes to stability and everyday use, put some money into your hardware forpeetsakes. Use what you’ve learned and put together a piece of equipment that will last and that you can trust.

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