CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

zaphod · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2002 Location: Cloverdale

needs a network connection, only the little Drobo-lite seems to have one, not the 4 or 8 bay models. sharing files/environments across machines and platforms is really really useful.

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

David_Web · Joined: 02 May 2007 Posts: 418 Location: Sweden

A good vid to watch if you are interested in Drobo or other NAS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCFvEYNwbXw

I personally built a NAS with freenas. 6 1TB spinpoint F1 in Raid-Z (ZFS)

I tried to break it by swapping connectors around, disabling the second controller to get another port range and even delete the disks from freenas.
The pool always came up online!
There is no speed difference if you pop a disk out ether so you don't notice it's degraded. I did not tax it fully as the computer I tested it from could not shuffle data quickly enough to load the system.

It draws 126W if any one is interested. It does not draw more than that ether nor goes down much so I think I need to tweak power settings. Not sure if all that is fully working.

I could have done it with less but I wanted scaleability and that means a good CPU and good memory (i did 4GB) if you want to do ZFS.
ZFS is a little CPU hungry and it gets worse the more disks you have.
C2D E7400 should be enough.
I guess you could underclock it and then bring it up more when needed. Ill have to look in to that.

Read up on it before you decide. You need to understand the basics if you want to go freenas and do it right. But it is really simple once you get there. Easy to try out as well.