Viability of AMD Fusion C-60 running FreeNAS or Openfiler.

[velocityg4]

I've been eyeing building myself a NAS for a while. The big hangup for me has been energy usage. Otherwise I would have one as I've got several Core 2 Duo CPU's, Celeron (core based) and a Core 2 Quad sitting about.

I was considering an Intel Atom board a while back. However it still used more energy than I would like. It also had too few SATA ports for my tastes.

For the heck of it I recently looked up AMD's offerings and came across this AMD Fusion C-60 based board the ASUS C60M1-I. This board offers 6 SATA ports so there is plenty of room for expansion and the Fusion C-60 only uses 9 Watts. After considering usage with an 80+ bronze or better PSU and hard drives this would be within an acceptable watt usage for an always on appliance. It should be very close to the ARM based NAS offered by QNAP and Synology.

The probelm I'm pondering is would this weak CPU be enough to handle Openfiler or FreeNAS. I've lost interest in unRAID since it appears you can only use three drives without paying. When all is said and done I want my Gigabit Ethernet to be the only bottleneck when reading or writing to the NAS. Not the CPU being overburdened.

Also I don't know too much about these OSes.
- Can I add drives later and expand the array like on a QNAP or Synology?
- Are there additional network services available as QNAP and Synology do? Such as an FTP server, iTunes server, SMS/e-mail alerts, Web Server, and so forth.
- After setup can this be administered headless? I want to tuck it away out of site.
- Is there a better OS to use for the NAS? Should I look more along the lines of a full featured OS like Ubuntu?

 

[openprivacy]

Same board, same idea

Looks like a good match to me, and FreeNAS seems to be the way to go, but I am just starting a similar search and have similar questions.

According to one reviewer on Newegg, it runs FreeNAS 8.0.4 just fine (but the reviewer reports some issues with the NIC). I'm looking at using the CHENBRO SR30169T2-250 which only holds 4 disks, but 4 2TB drives in RAID 5 will give me 6 TB storage, which seems adequate for a while.

Have you found out any more information?

 

[hchung]

I'm under the impression that neither FreeNAS nor OpenFiler has working online expansion of parity raid configs. As in, neither of these will expand a raid5 pool just by adding a disk.

I've seen articles about adding media servers for FreeNAS and OpenFiler, so I believe both have that option. You may need to learn a bit of terminal skillz in order to do it. Likewise, since these are BSD and Linux respectively, they can all be administered over ssh or http.