[Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build

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

On 7/3/2015 2:47 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> I'd ask if FreeNAS has been ported to any of them, but given the way
> FreeNAS seems to have moved towards requiring more "enterprise" hardware
> (ECC RAM, and lots of it), that seems unlikely.

ECC RAM is a requirement for full ZFS integrity, and "lots of it" is for 
deduplication. The former is good to have in any kind of storage 
appliance or server, and putting the L2ARC on fast SSD reduces the 
dependency on the latter assuming you even want to use in-band dedup.

> If you do go the build route, there doesn't seem to be any way to
> approach the compact packaging of the appliances, or the pricing. Just
> the enclosure and hot-swap bays (a bit of steel and plastic) can end up
> costing as much as the appliance above.

DIY is substantially more expensive when you consider your time and the 
hassle of trying to work inside a microserver chassis. And you lose out 
on economy of scale since bare bones microservers aren't anywhere near 
as popular as bare bones gaming towers.

> The HP micro servers that have been discussed here several times have
> gone out of production, I think. In any case, they seem a bit dated now.

Yeah. The N series are out, the Gen 8 series is in. And they look very 
tasty.

-- 
Rich P.