[Discuss] N40L on sale for $179.99 at PC Connection Express

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

I'm seeing it listed at $250 right now.  Given the company profile I'm guessing that they're really a front-end for many sellers and those sellers set the prices that PCCE displays.  $250 is well worth the price.  Other than the complete failure of FreeNAS to work, which could easily have been my own fault, I've really only two complaints about the box.

The first is actually the long-standing Linux device enumeration issue.  If you try to make a zpool out of /dev/sd[b-e] and reboot you may find yourself without a zpool as those disks are /dev/sd[a-d].  Fortunately, there is a workaround: use the /dev/disk/by-id references when creating or importing a zpool.  This ensures that disks are referenced by unique, static identifiers.

The second is zfs-fuse write performance is pretty poor.  There are some tuning options I want to tweak to see if I can improve that.  I may need to realign everything by rebuilding the RAID-Z on partitions instead of raw disks.  I count it a learning experience: I get to play with zpool send and zpool receive to see how they work.

--Rich P.