Home server

[Paul Gear]

On 01/15/2013 08:18 PM, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote:
> Hey Jared,
>
> Just so you've got some context, I've got the N40L model, running with 
> 8GB RAM and 4x 2TB drives. 2 of the drives are running btrfs as root 
> (/), and the other two are /backup. Everything else is stock, no 
> custom RAID cards, etc.

I'll answer similarly for one of the ones i recently deployed: N40L, 
stock 2 GB RAM, 4 x 2 TB drives; first 32 GB of each drive is RAID 1 for 
boot volumes, remainder of drives is a single RAID 5 partition.

>     * how loud are they in real world applications?
>
>
> It's got a massive fan at the back, but it's at the ambient fan noise 
> level you easily ignore. The drives are louder when they are doing 
> lots of writes. In fact, my laptop when it's running super hot is 
> louder than it. So I personally don't notice the noise coming from it.

General consensus is it's very quiet.  Because it's a 12cm fan, it seems 
much quieter than any tower or rack mount server i've ever used.  (But 
my hearing might be bad after sitting in the same office as a ProCurve 
3400cl switch for too long. :-)
>
>     * what sort of network throughput do you see?
>
>
> I can't really comment on this one. I've never noticed it to be an 
> issue for anything I've used it for, and I did have it as a VPN end 
> point for my work at one point so it saw a lot of data throughput 
> without any issues. Also, I usually have 2 VMs running in Virtual Box 
> on it and all three machines (host + 2x VMs) seem to be quite 
> responsive for my needs network-wise.

Here's a graph from ours: http://libertysys.com.au/imagebin/n40l-network.png

This is running on the inbuilt network card with no attempt to optimise 
performance.  Usually the bottleneck on our backups (which is what this 
traffic is) is either the source or destination disk. Never the network 
unless it is plugged into a 100 Mbps port.  This server is plugged into 
a Gigabit copper port.

>     * any surprises in the hardware running Ubuntu?
>
>
> I've only tried 12.04 LTS, but it runs flawlessly. Everything I've 
> tried works without any problems.

None.  The server graphed above is actually running CentOS 6, but the 
latest one i've deployed is Ubuntu 12.04.

>     If anyone has any insight I'd be interested, I'm looking for a
>     good balance between power consumption and enough power to run a
>     couple of other things that a basic NAS can't do.
>

I think it's a pretty good compromise between the two.  My next personal 
server will be one of them for sure.

Paul

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