NAS using SATA and ATA disks

nasraidstorage

I have about 10 hard drives some SATA 2 and some ATA. I would like to build a NAS box where I can use all these disks and build a hugh NAS disk. All disks together sums about 3 TB. I know that combining ATA and SATA will reduce the speed, but I don't care.

My idea is NOT having a computer on the network with a bunch of disks. My idea was to have a box where I can put all disks and that gives me the following (I don't know if this is possible, but here we go)…

  • ONE disk is seen on the network
  • the NAS is a kind of RAID-0, i.e., everything stored there is mirrored.
  • if a drive fails, I don't lose anything.
  • it sleeps when not being accessed and wakes up by lan.
  • it uses ethernet and if possible has wifi too.

is there a product that matches this? If not, can it be built from scratch?

Best Answer

Your best bet is really building an OpenSolaris box, ZFS really shines for this kind of application. You can build one Raid-Z array out of all your disks, ZFS will do CRC checks on all disk blocks for you, you can export the disks as SMB shares or NFS mounts or iSCSI blocks.

The built-in volume manager will let you take filesystem snapshots for backup purposes or to move them to another ZFS host, and if you have an SSD you can put it to good use for the ZFS intent log - meaning that suddenly all your data access will be as quick as the SSD.

This meets four out of your five requirements, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can manage somehow to make the thing sleep and wake up via WOL.

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