4 ms·

[Original] OP here. I wrote this five years ago and it stands up pretty well. HP Microservers are a great device but if I were to build a new one today I'd lo

by mocko 10y ago

[Original] OP here. I wrote this five years ago and it stands up pretty well. HP Microservers are a great device but if I were to build a new one today I'd look into using one of the many cheap ARM boards (NB: ZFS allegedly needs 64-bit to be stable) with disks in a USB-attached enclosure. Performance with USB3 should be enough for any home NAS and the hardware should come out even cheaper. There may even be ARM-based NAS boxes on the market that'll do the job.

fest 10y ago
Have you measured the average power draw of this box? Does the hardware support wake from LAN traffic sent to it?
- mocko 10y ago
  Sure did - I haven't the figures to hand but it wasn't alarming. Microservers are more about storage than compute so they have fairly low-power CPUs. Yes; YMMV but according to http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Wake-on-Lan_(WOL) http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Wake-on-Lan_(WOL) everything in the Microserver family does support WoL. Power-wise, one thing that never really satisfied me about the setup was that it was hard to spin down disks. I never really dug into why but suspect ZFS is fairly 'chatty' with the underlying storage which prevented the spindown timeout being reached. Can anyone who's looked more closely confirm or deny this?
aligibbs 10y ago
16gb will work no worries :-)
nrki 10y ago
I'd recommend against using raid-z(X) on a USB enclosure. The throughput to each disk just isn't there. Also, my experiences using ZFS(onlinux) without any raid (i.e. single disk with "copies=" > 1) is that it wasn't very resilient against any kind of I/O error - even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup.
- ashark 10y ago
  > even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup. Yikes. Is it similarly fragile in the event of sudden power loss?
- mocko 10y ago
  Is the throughput bad even with USB3? You're looking at 625MB/s which even after signalling overhead ought to be sufficient to saturate 3-4 magnetic disks. Latency might still be a concern but personally I've always found [non-ZFS] throughput to be great.

by mocko 10y ago

fest 10y ago

Have you measured the average power draw of this box? Does the hardware support wake from LAN traffic sent to it?

mocko 10y ago
Sure did - I haven't the figures to hand but it wasn't alarming. Microservers are more about storage than compute so they have fairly low-power CPUs. Yes; YMMV but according to http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Wake-on-Lan_(WOL) http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Wake-on-Lan_(WOL) everything in the Microserver family does support WoL. Power-wise, one thing that never really satisfied me about the setup was that it was hard to spin down disks. I never really dug into why but suspect ZFS is fairly 'chatty' with the underlying storage which prevented the spindown timeout being reached. Can anyone who's looked more closely confirm or deny this?

aligibbs 10y ago

16gb will work no worries :-)

nrki 10y ago

I'd recommend against using raid-z(X) on a USB enclosure. The throughput to each disk just isn't there. Also, my experiences using ZFS(onlinux) without any raid (i.e. single disk with "copies=" > 1) is that it wasn't very resilient against any kind of I/O error - even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup.

ashark 10y ago
> even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup. Yikes. Is it similarly fragile in the event of sudden power loss?
mocko 10y ago
Is the throughput bad even with USB3? You're looking at 625MB/s which even after signalling overhead ought to be sufficient to saturate 3-4 magnetic disks. Latency might still be a concern but personally I've always found [non-ZFS] throughput to be great.