Simple, Fast and Power Efficient NAS...?

[loyukfai]

Want to build a simple & fast NAS just for serving data and backup storage for family; Low power consumption is preferable; Ability to fill a Gigabit Ethernet connection would be desirable.

Thinking about AMD Brazos (Zacate) E350 or Intel Atom (Pineview) D525; E350 seems to be a little bit more powerful and power efficient, but D525 boards are generally cheaper than E350 ones; The fanless Intel D525MW is available with 2 x SO-DIMM slots, supports max. 4GB of RAM, but no PCIe slot. The Foxconn AHD1S-K is also fanless, uses DIMM, supports max. 8GB of RAM, has a PCIe x16 slot, but costs 15% more.

Will be running off 2 x 2.5" HDD in mirror mode, which I have now, in the beginning to keep the project cost low.

That's about it for the hardware I guess...

For software, thinking about Ubuntu Server or Debian with webmin. Tried Openfiler before but it seems too complicated. For the file system it seems ZFS is a good choice although not built-in like ext4. The OS shall be installed onto a USB flash with RAM disk backup for /tmp.

Cheers.

[loyukfai]

In case anybody is interested, I've finished building it...

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showt ... #post35670

[jdk]

6GB of RAM seems fine for FreeNAS.

[loyukfai]

Yes, according to the recommendation (http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Requirements). Seems ZFS needs lot of RAM (for good performance).

But one can use UFS if there's not enough RAM.

Cheers.