I’m considering creating myself a little network attached storage, and I’d like to bounce my ideas here before starting the implementation.
This is for personal, in-home use only. The goal is two-fold, with the primary one being to have a more robust storage for my “long term file collection” of photos such, and the second goal is just to learn and have fun. I currently have these files on an SSD in my windows machine, but as I’m now moving to more of a multi-computer setup with also Linux workstations involved I want to move on.
The basic thoughts so far is to create a small, low-power machine runnig FreeBSD or possibly TueNAS Core with an ZFS file system that I share to my other machines. I
Computing hardware would ideally be something robust and low power, and I’ve been looking at ITX-sized Atom hardware with ECC support that is easily available in my country (Sweden). 'm trying to create something that is virtually silent, so if fans are needed, I want to keep them running slowly.
For the actual storage I’m now considering having a couple of SSDs running as a mirrored vdev, mainly to reduce the amount of moving parts, and to get the redudancy of mirrors. In total I’m looking at having something along the lines of 2 TB in this share, I’m currently using 1 TB and it’s growing rather slowly - so 2 TB should be fine for quite some time, even if using snapshots.
So… any generic comments or advice on the way? Any sources I’ve missed that have alreay created what I’m looking for? Bad idea to use SSDs in this way? Are the low power Atom boards powerful enough for my use?
Is it a good idea to use comporession for my use case? I guess that the MPEGs and JPEGs won’t compress too much, but I have other files too.
(And no ,this is not a replacement for backups, I still will want to take real backsups and move off-site).