So I have this FreeNAS server that I built a while ago. I’ve been pretty happy with it but recently it lunched it’s OS drive.
I farted around with it, tried to replace the OS drive with a CF card, no luck. FreeNAS is supposed to run off a USB stick, but my motherboard is too old and the BIOS doesn’t support booting off a USB stick.
Over the weekend I booted it off the FreeNAS CD and copied all the data to my 1TB USB drive, so that is a win anyway.
Yesterday I finally gave up and went to MicroCenter and bought a reconditioned 80GB hard drive for $15(!). I installed the latest version of FreeNAS (8.0.2) and rebuilt the ZFS RAID array. I have to say, the v8 interface is very nice compared to the v7 interface.
Then one of the drives in the array started tossing errors. SMART is detecting bad sectors. All three drives are the same age…
I started shopping for drives. Both MicroCenter and Newegg have 1.5TB SATA drives for $70. I could buy two and mirror them. BUT both Newegg and MicroCenter limit purchases to one drive! WTF? How am I supposed to build a RAID array with one drive?
AND my motherboard is old and does not have SATA on it. Nor does it have PCIe. It has PCI-X. So I would have to buy a SATA controller for $45. And SATA cables. And power cord adapters.
For those of you counting along that would be around $200.
****** OR ******
I could buy an Iomega® StorCenter™ ix2-200 with 2TB of storage for $200.
The reviews on Newegg are not bad, and C|Net gave it a Very Good rating.
Sounds kind of like a no-brainer actually. My home brew NAS is big – it’s in a huge rack mount case. It sucks a lot of juice. It needs $200 worth of parts to make it go.
The iomega NAS is small, uses much less power and is $200.
I think I’m going to buy the iomega…
*UPDATED*
I bought the iomega NAS. Can’t wait until it gets here!
