HP ProLiant ML350 G6

For some reason I ended up choosing used HP ProLiant ML 350 G6 as a base for my archive. I suppose some things like onboard RAID will make things bit difficult, but atleast I will have plenty of ECC memoryslots.



Machine is in the mail, hoping to get it soon. Some extra bits and pieces will arrive later, but I am hoping to take first tests pretty soon.

Freenas test

I wanted to try out freenas, unfortunately I found only too old 32bit computers from my home. Lucky for me, my friend gave me an old Lenovo, 71y8458. It is 64bit, but takes only 4gigs of memory, and freenas corral wants 8.



So I suppose this is not going to be my final archive platform, but now I have something to experiment on.

Got 3 small disks I put together to a zfs pool. So now I can do some tests with this. Seems to work pretty well. Unfortunately the processor I have does not support virtualisation, so I will not be able to test all features on this setup, but files seem to move between 20mb/s and 30 mb/s, when my network drives tend to stay under 10mb/s.

First impressions are very positive, Freenas was reasonably easy to install and it looks nice and seems pretty logical to set up. I will continue testing on this setup, and try to make plans for more serious setup.

 

My options

As I am wondering about my options here, I suppose I could either get a new commercial NAS with newer processor and bigger disks (Like Qnap 8 bay models), or start building something around freenas, nas4free or something similar.

Commercial NAS would seem like an easy option, but on the other hand I really appreciate the open source software. Self build NAS would also give more options on hardware updates.

I have a reasonably big photo archive, roughly 17 terabytes of digital photos and 1 terabyte of scanned negatives. Some of it is just for my personal use, some are from festivals or things events I want to share with other organizers or publicly.

Now my photos are stored on 2 network drives. Drives are old and cheap, they can hardly manage data storage, and they are about to run out of space.

My aim is to build a new archive where I can fit all my photos and I can use for my photosharing and publishing.