Christopher Warner Studies and thoughts, usually in coherent fashion.

14Mar/110

Specification Pepsi Openindiana Build 148 – FAQ

I'm going to try in earnest to keep this post updated with relevant information about Specification Pepsi - Openindiana Build 148 as i'm now calling it.

Specification Pepsi Openindiana Build 148

  1. How much energy does the entire machine use?

    On initial boot with the Samsung Optical SH-223L/BEBS spinning up we hit 95 watts, the system then drops to about 50watts and as it idles out drops to between 47 and 48 watts. While pushing the machine using all 4 drives as stated in the spec, we fluctuate between 50 and 57 watts.

  2. Why the 750w ATX Power supply?

    Based on the above data the 750w would seem to be overkill but in my specific case I have multiple units plugged into the motherboard. If one doesn't plan on adding more than 4-6 hard drives you could easily get away with a 200-250 watt power supply. I'm going to search around for one and update the original specification.

  3. Do you need to have the optical drive?

    Not necessarily, you could technically remove the optical drive after install of the specification if you wanted to save on initial start up power. However the unit spins up only on start-up and considering it will be rarely if ever used, it's pretty much a complete non-issue.

  4. No ECC memory, will that be an issue?

    In the original specification I noted the addition of ECC memory. Well, the Intel D5x doesn't support ECC memory most likely to save as much energy as possible. It also doesn't support Dual Channel memory, again for the same reason. Not the biggest deal in the world for this machine as it's primarily used for storage and technically speaking the likelyhood of getting severe degradation or errors are low. Still, it would of been a nice to have. To my knowledge I don't know of any mini-itx motherboard manufacturers that support ECC memory. At least not yet.

  5. Instead of the D510, why not the D525?

    Well, if we take a quick look at a comparison between the D510 and the D525 we see that we gain a minute speed bump in processing and DDR3 instead of DDR2 and wattage remains unchanged. None of this quite frankly mattered to me at the time as the D510 was roughly $20.00 USD less. None of the stated improvements would significantly speed up the function of archival and storage. This obviously changes if you plan to do compression or encryption with ZFS in which case it may then become useful. In reality though it would make much more sense to apply that extra $20.00 USD to a proper gzip or encryption off-board card.

  6. How much will it cost you to operate this unit?

    I pay roughly 9 cents per kwh off the top of my head. I'll have to update with exacts next time I check but based on that number we are looking at close to $3.05 USD per month with the machine running at an average of 0.47kw/h or roughly $37.00 USD a year. Not such a horrible price for the machine that backs up my lively hood. Not that bad at all.
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6Mar/110

OpenIndiana ZFS Server

Recently I had to upgrade the hardware for my research server due to a massive hardware failure. The failure itself hasn't been diagnosed properly but turns out it was essentially a ram failure of my OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 modules or a chip failure. The near loss of all of my research data and work had me in a slight panic. Luckily getting new hardware got me up and running and everything worked out fine.

Specification Pepsi Openindiana Build 148

The machine is named 'pepsi' and consist of the following hardware (all prices are current as of 03/22/2011):

* This item is to be part of a refactor meaning that this was originally built for my needs but one doesn't actually need 750 Watts for power and can get by with a 200-250W power supply. Also not included is the price of the 4 hard drives as these are what I had in the original pool. In this case a sufficient comparable HD should do and not fall to far out of bounds in regards to power requirements.

Software wise we have:

A couple of things to note here on the machine build. The BIOS for the D510 Intel NM10 needed to be upgraded to the latest version as the board I ordered and received was almost a year behind in updates. Newegg did get the delivery to me within 1 day of ordering however which was blazingly fast considering. The fans were ordered because the case comes with a 120 and 140mm fan. The 120mm fan isn't that loud but the 140mm fan has blue leds, which I simply have no tolerance for. The D510 mini-itx board itself is amazingly small and includes a mini pcie port that I can eventually stash a mini pcie wireless card in.

Also, the Vantec 6-Port has 4 internal sata ports and 2 external ESATA ports. It's powered by the SiS 3114 raid controller which is basically some hodge podge mess onboard. They provide a straight-through IDE BIOS upgrade for the chipset available from the Silicon Image manufacturers website. You will need this if you want to use this chipset under OpenIndiana primarily because it doesn't automatically detect this chipset otherwise. Moving from sata to ide may mean no hot-swap but I haven't necessarily tried this yet. I'll update after I hook up another 4TB store, i'm moving the data around now as we speak.

Luckily my custom board wasn't damaged and all of the data on disk were fine. I am currently not at liberty to discuss the custom add-on board but hopefully i'll remember to revisit this post when I am.

Normally I only buy ECC ram however to keep cost low and because I had verified my data wasn't severely damaged, I have foregone the option for this machine. After some burn-in time I will most likely upgrade to an ECC ram module.

Before the hardware failure the most critical and important pool was my research pool which was a RAIDZ 1TB zfs pool. After installing OpenIndiana and setting up netatalk which now supports Time Machine backup I simply did a zfs import -f poolname and was back in business.

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