Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS.<p>I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either.<p>The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad.<p>OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.
I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and fuzzies.<p>I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home.<p>But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface.<p>Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages.<p>At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I <i>KNOW</i> the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system).<p>Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.
I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at <a href="http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server" rel="nofollow">http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server</a>. Daz at <a href="http://sigtar.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sigtar.com/</a> has done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I have built my file server.
I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks.<p>I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.
I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap<p><a href="http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs</a><p>It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian:<p><a href="http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/</a>
there was a similar post on nerdblog recently: <a href="http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html</a>