New ZFS Home Fileserver Hardware for OpenSolaris

In posts coming up I will talk about my setup, software, etc. This post I am just dedicating to my hardware and main OpenSolaris setup.

So I finally put together my ZFS OpenSolaris box. The specifications for the main pieces of hardware I have used are below (from Newegg with links):

1. AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor Model HDX810WFGIBOX - Retail
2. Four Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM
3. Two G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK - Retail
4. GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
5. Antec TPQ-850 850W Continuous Power ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active ... - Retail
6. SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure - Retail
8. Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

Yes the power supply is probably over kill, but it was a really highly rated one on sale lower priced than some of the lower wattage ones that would probably fit my needs. The system has 8 gigs of ram and 4 cores for the OpenSolaris OS to chew on. Reason I did that is I installed VirtualBox and put on an Ubuntu V-Box. I wanted all my virtual boxes to be able to have 1 or more gigs, and a couple CPU's if they needed it. So far it's working out pretty good.

The box also has four 1 terabyte drives in it giving it a full 3 terabytes to it's storage capacity, using Raid-Z (the ZFS raid) with single parity (although dual parity is supported without effort, as well as other configurations). So one drive is the parity drive and effectively I could lose one without any data loss. I have all my media now on this server, and I am putting more of my son's DVD's on the server and putting them in a box and storing them. I love this, as my children now will no longer scratch DVD's beyond use and every TV in the house has "video on demand" if you will with the setup I have.

I use the built on video card at the moment, so nothing fancy there. But this is a server that mostly works headless once I have it setup, so I don't need anything really in this case.