Custom File Server Specs

So I built a file server some time back to provide 10G SMB shares to my windows PC's, ISCSI to my Proxmox Hosts, and NFS for my Linux workstation VM's. Cost performance, and upgradeability were major factors, so while I could have easily  purchased an off the shelf NAS or a Dell R210ii, so I decided to build out a whitebox solution. 

Here are the specs:

OS:                                  Ubuntu 16.04.2LTS

CPU:                               i3 2120T

RAM:                              Samsung DDR3 1333Mhz

Motherboard:                Intel DQ67OW
PSU:                                Be Quiet L8 600W              

Network Card 1:           Intel i340-T4

Network Card 2:           Mellanox ConnectX-3

SSD:                               Samsung 840 Evo 120GB

HDD 1:                           Seagate Firecuda 1TB

HDD 2:                           Hitachi Deskstar 400GB     

HDD 3:                           Hitachi Deskstar 400GB

CPU Cooler:                   Arctic Alpine 11 

Case Fans:                      Arctic F12 PWM

The Intel DQ67OW was the perfect motherboard at the time as it had Intel AMT which allowed for remote managment (which I never ended up using), supported all of the Sandy-Bridge CPUs upto the i7 4770K and the E3 Xeon line which meant that it could be easily upgraded. The Arctic fans and heatsink provide more than enough airflow. The case was an old Intel SC5299DP that I purchased off ebay and sprayed matte black.

I used ubuntu as it is extreemly versatile and supports pretty much everything even though it may take some tinkering around. Samba ISUCIand NFS are official Ubuntu packages and can be installed from the terminal relatively easily.

The 1TB Seagate is used for backing up my laptop, while the Samsung SSD is used to transfer videos and photos from the laptop and camera to my Dell R710 workstation for editing and rendering over a 10G ethernet connection. The dual 400GB HDDs are mirrored in ZFS and provide backup for non-critical VMs and LXC containers from my proxmox hosts. I'm in the process of upgrading to all SSD storage for my VM's so that I have the speed to run them directly of the file server. Also I am looking into getting a HBA (H200) and a few 2TB HDDs for cold storage on ZFS.

This is by no means the best that money can buy, but bear in mind that this was build some years ago and with the arrival of Ryzen the intel second-hand market has become allot cheaper as people are building new systems with Ryzen as opposed to buying second-hand Intel and so they have become harder to sell (especially i3 cpus) and as a result they are cheaper, at least from Chinese vendors.

There seems to be alot of confusion online as to how much RAM ZFS needs/eats. ZFS will utilize all free RAM as cache, people seems to think that they need 1GB per TB of storage. However, bear in mind that this is for enterprise environments that need the performance from the moment the  system is commissioned. Always buy less and test before upgrading the ram unless its going super cheap.

In the future I want to build a Ceph/GlusterFS and Openstack cluster for experimenting on. I'll update this article as I upgrade the lab in the future. 

Thanks for reading and happy labbing.