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May 20, 2008
Chenbro ES34069-Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis as new unRAID server
Chenbro ES34069
The Chenbro ES34069 is a cool lil mini ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis that I've been using for a while to house one of my unRAID servers from Lime Technology.
What can I say, I outgrew my kuro boxes and needed a new method of storing data, music, video, backups in a reliable manner. I choose to go the tiny route to save some space and power using ITX and a mobile processor.
Lo and Behold my new data warehouse is born. Unraid ITX (pics enclosed)
There are many cool features about this mini ITX case I like, and a few I have issues with.
On the Positive side.
Small, but not too small to work with
Accepts 4 SATA Drives + 1 2.5" Laptop drive + 1 SLIM optical Media Drive + built in Card reader
Two 70MM fans on back which are pretty quiet and cool the drives and cpu well.
Accepts a special PCI riser card so you can use a small PCI raid card.
The case is very well ventilated. and if need be, you can put in a 60MM fan on the front.
4 removable hotswap SATA trays
On the negative side.
I disike the external bricks, but sometimes it's the price you pay for small size.
The card reader and PCI card are very hard to come by. I had to order them separately frmo the UK (that was expensive).
I would have really liked to have had an externally accessible PCI edge so I could use an eSATA connector, but no pci edge is accesible externally.. therefore I had to do some modding of my own.
The PCI riser does come with a special bracket to lock it in, but it did not fit well with the promise TX4. If you are not careful it can rise out of the motherboard.
Parts List
Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis From Logic Supply
At First I went with the Jetway J7F2WE1 From Newegg
It was cheap had the CPU and I had the spare 1GB ram module.
Later on I switched to a higher end MSI board that could support more ram.
MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mobile Mini-ITX Mainboard From Logic Supply
OCZ Gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory From Newegg
Internal Card reader & PCI Riser Card www.mini-itx.com
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II 4-Port Adapter NewEgg.Com
Kingston 2GB Secure Digital (SD) Flash Card w/MobileLite Reader Model FCR-ML+SD/2GB From Newegg
and a bunch of 500GB SATA II drives laying around.
Slim Optical Slot load Panasonic Optical drive from eBay.
Duo Core 2.33 GHZ CPU from eBay
In general, I really like the chassis, motherboard, machine OS and form factor. I've already touted unRAID as a home server NAS environment. This chassis is a perfect fit for it.
One might have chosen to forgo the internal card reader, however unraid loads it;'s OS from a USB flash and there is a license tied to the flash GUID. This was a necessary evil, so I went for the embedded card reader.
Why did you buy a 2GB card and card reader you ask? This card reader, in particular, accepts all three SD media SD/MiniSD/MicroSD. It;s just a handy device to have around. I really needed the 2GB card and I did Not want this big bulky card reader hanging off the chassis. So it's more for a cleaner look. Besides the price was right!
Overall the build was pretty easy, Screws come off the back the motherboard tray pulls out.
One thing is that you have to build these boxes in order. So I had to install things in steps.
First the 2.5" laptop drive,
Then the card reader.
Then the motherboard, ram, route cables, PCI card to riser, Slide riser down, re-route cables so it did not push the riser card out.
Last but not least the slim optical media. This is where things became a problem.
If your board and memory are too high or close to the optical media, you will be unable to install it.
When I started out, I had the Jetway board with the AMD Geode. I got this from newegg at a very cost effective price of $129 with a $20 rebate. Not too shabby as it came with the CPU and I had a spare gig ram chip laying around. This setup performed very well. The only downside was the board's Ethernet is not natively supported by unraid. This caused me to get a 3 port 1GB Ethernet daughter board. (ugh). Once installed that worked like a charm. I knew one day I was going to rebuild gatekeeper as a mini itx machine so I knew this board would be put to use elsewhere.
I had the need for more ram because unRAID's root filesystem is in ram. this is good and bad. Good because you can spin down all the disks and the system still functions and bad because you need a decent amount of ram if you want to load other packages.
unRAID is based on Slackware 12, so installing packages is really easy.
It seems as you find more uses for an almost idle machine, you find yourself adding packages.
Very soon I had a caching nameserver, time server, dhcp server. etc, etc.. Then I decided I wanted to move my bittorrent to this device and I saw the need for more ram. Perl/php/Apache/mysql and sure enough.. now you need the ram for root.
The MSI mainboard was quite sufficient. it accepted the 4GB of ram yielding 3.2GB to the OS after loading. This is due to the bios/pci reserve area and the nature of the chipset. Still, it's enough!
With a cheap 2.33Ghz Dual core mobile processor the machine became a quite able workhorse.
I'm hoping to one day get vmware server running on it and possible rip dvd's and compress them directly on the NAS box.
As I mentioned on the downside, I could not lock/screw down the Promise TX4 PCI card and riser. Perhaps a different card would work better, but this bracket just did not fit well with the promise.
I had to have 4 SATA ports so I had to go with what was available.
I took 1 of the internal SATA motherboard ports and attached it to the 2.5: laptop drive.
as I mentioned, once I get vmware server running on it, I plan to run a ripping xp environment and a slackware development environment right on the box.
Also unraid makes use of a feature called a cache drive whereby all writes happen to a temporary work drive.
Later on in the eve, the files are moved from the cache drive to the raid array, thereby providing very fast writes because you do not do the parity calculation until files are moved to the protected JBOD array.
Ithink the main reason for this was to handle HD video streaming without having RAID parity calculation causing delays. Don't get me wrong the system is fast enough, but the ram cache fills up fast and the nature of parity calculation may cause pauses.
After all sata connections were made, I realized I had one more unused motherboard connector and I thought... Gee.. allI need is an eSATA adpater and I can attach a 5th drive...
A quick look at the case shows a vent at the back. A few nibbles here and there and I was able to unscrew the eSATA from the PCI bracket and attach it to the back of the case. I'm not using it right now, but should the need com e where I have to expand or backup data, I want to do it at top speed!
So although simpler then my ReadyNAS interface, and not as mature as openfiler, unRAID is going to be a serious contender due to the way it uses disks.
As I outgrow and retire my Kurobox-HG's I think how far we've come and how much I enjoy building these lil machines.
Stay tuned as I still have a few more project builds as I plan to dabble with clustering, iSCSI and new backup technology.
Links of Interest
http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=100
http://x-case.co.uk/p/404991/chenbro-es34069-mini-itx-home-servernas-chassis---just-arrived.html
http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2008/03/27/the-chenbro-es34069-case-review-part-1/
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=42¤cy=0
What to watch out for:
You will see a number of different pricing structures on the net. One must ask.. how can one company have this product $40 cheaper? Read the fine print. Some of them do not have a power supply, or possibly the heat sink or other cables.
I bought mine from Logic supply and it came with everything needed.
Ram Height and Placement if you plan to use slim optical media. You may have to get a motherboard with ram placement further back or go with low profile ram.
With the MSI and OCZ ram I just barely made it!
Posted by Me at 12:00 AM
May 01, 2008
unRAID unvieled. my new NAS OS.
Today I bring to view, unRAID from LIME TECHNOLOGY.
This has been something I've been exploring for quite some time now. As all the hard drives in my network started filling up from DVD rips I knew there had to be a better way. It's easy enough to buy a new hard drive, but then you have to consider how do you backup the precious data you've just placed on it.. Buy another, then raid them.
The downside of this is, you are always growing and you have to keep buying 2 drives for raid-1 or growing filesystems across multiple drives. Geeze, then god forbid you loose two drives in a raid-5 set up! This happened to me once and I'll never forget it.
I also was considering just how many spindles are spinning on the network for each raid set up. As it grows, so do the costs of keeping them live.
Don't get me wrong here, I love my readyNAS NV+. It's a great lil box, but I noticed I was outgrowing the 4 slots and realized how much time it takes to grow the file systems across multiple spindles.
Granted, RAID5 across multiple spindles has it's advantages,
Redundancy, Fast read speed, Large filesystem support.
But it also has it's cons such as...
Difficulty in expansion, How do you backup a multi terabyte raid 5 filesystem and what happens when you loose more then one spindle in a raid 5 environment.
I've had this issue in the past where I lost 2 spindles (due to simpel IDE lockups) and the raid 5 array was shot... Many mp3's from napster lost.. Oh well.
What I really like about unRAID is that each hard drive spindle becomes it's own filesystem. To me this has the pro of easy migration to larger hard drives, and the con of managing multiple hard drives and navigation across them.
unRAID solves all my neesd for a Media Storage (or backup storage) server.
It's actually a protected JBOD. Similar to RAID4 but without the striping across multiple spindles.
Each Hard drive (of any size) uses a shared parity drive (must be the largest in the system), granted there is a slight performance penalty, but for a media storage box it far outweighs the management of a mult-spindle raid5 arrangement.
Because each drive is it's own filesystem, you can litterally stop the raid array, put in a larger hard drive, restart, and the volume will be rebuilt/expanded onto the larger drive.
In addition since each drive shares the parity, the chances of loosing all your data to a multiple drive failure drop dramatically.
I.E. The array will survive a single drive failure and rebuilt the failed drive when replaced.
If by some chance, you loose a second drive, then you only loose the data on those two drives. The other remaining drives will still be intact because they have thier own separate file systems.
My only beef is that the author users reiserfs instead of ext3.. but it's a small price to pay
On the plus side, The unraid environment is designed to run the root filesystem in ram.
All the data drives are mounted, but programmed to spind down on inactivity.
This became a major plus for me with all the hard drives spinning on my network, and summer coming along with no a/c in my computer area..
Another cool feature of unRAID is it's userspace filesystem.
Because you have multiple drives and data may not all fit on one spindle, there is the user space filesystem that sort of joins the multiple drives into a single view.
Let's say for example you have 10 disks and a DVD folder.
If you program the share to overflow onto 5 of the disks, when one of the drives starts to fill up the user space filesystem will automatically write the next file to the other disk.
It's configurable at what directory level the disk toggle works too.
On Reads, you do not have to know which disk the file is on because the userspace filesystem keeps indexes of all the files in memory and knows what disk it's on.
So over the last few months I've been playing with this and I like it allot.
I plan to use it as my backup system with HDUP (possbly backula) and media server.
I have two systems I'll be pimping in the near future, in the meantime here's unRAID!
PROS
Root filesystem in ram, very easy OS install. Drop in on a USB key, set bootable. reboot.
UI is browser based and very simple to set up.
Each disk is part of a protected array, Think of it as a protected JBOD. Like RAID4 without stripping.
User Space Filesystem allows SMB shares across multiple drives to be seen as one. I.E. it hides the fact that you have the same directories on multple drives and shows them as one.
Simple slackware 12.0 install. you can install packages from the net easily.
Boot filesystem filts on a 128MB USB key.
Handles single drive failure without loosing data.
Multiple drive failure does not result in loss of every single drive, only the failed drives vs raid5 and loosing the whole array.
Can use spindles of any size as long as the parity drive is the largest drive in the array. (good way to make use of those old drives)
Can be set to spin drives down when not used for a period of time.
If need be, you can remove a drive and re-use it, accessing the data on the drive from another linux machine (as long as reiserfs is compiled into the kernel).
CONS
All of the easy of single spindle drive management.
You can migrate a drive from a smaller to a larger with a few clicks or simply swapping out the drive.
All of the performance penalty of RAID5 writes without any of the read performance. (The price you pay for easy management).
Reads do not require the parity drive so you get read performance of a single drive.
Userspace Filesystem has write performance penalty.
No NFS yet. (coming soon)
No iSCSI yet (coming soon)
Still a bit immature.
Cannot use other linux raid options because thw whole md/raid subsystem has been replaced.
Limit of 16 drives + 1 cache drive.
Cannot concat or raid0 multiple drives for parity therefore it must ALWAYS be the largest drive in the array.
Posted by Me at 11:00 PM