3 Minutes to 3 Terabytes: VIA ARTiGO and FreeNAS Store Terabytes in a Shoebox
By: Paul Ferrill
Friday, April 17, 2009 11:58:43 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6730/1/
3 Minutes to 3 Terabytes
It truly is a beautiful thing when something just works. This is especially true with computers. High capacity storage has become almost a commodity with the price of an external 1 TB USB hovering around $100. All you have to do is plug in the power and connect the USB cable, and you've got instant storage expansion. Works great for a single computer, and you could even unplug it from one and plug it into another. While that does work, it tends to get old after a while, and if you're using that method for backups, you will more than likely end up forgetting or just quitting altogether at some point.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is one answer to sharing large storage devices over a network. You could buy a NAS device from your favorite local or Internet supplier, but chances are you'll wind up with
Installation
Assembling the hardware couldn't be simpler. The ARTiGO A2000 has one screw on the rear of the box holding the case shell in place. Once that's out you can remove the front clip-on cover with two fingers. That exposes two slots for SATA hard drives and the CompactFlash slot. The hard drives slide easily on the rails and plug right into a connector at the back of the drive bay. Tighten two screws on each side to secure the drive to the frame, and you're all done. We used two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB drives for this review.
Getting the software up and running is a little more involved but not much. Step one is to download the FreeNAS software image from the project download page. The one you want is the latest FreeNAS Image file. For the VIA ARTiGO you'll need the i386 version. While you're on the download page you can also get a copy of the Quick Start Guide and User Manual. Once you have the image downloaded you must write the image to a CompactFlash (CF) device. The image itself is a little under 30 MB, so you could use an old 64 MB device if you happen to have one lying around.
Writing the image to the CF disk requires root privileges. The trick is to know that the .img file is actually compressed, requiring a gunzip command before writing to the disk. You can do it with one command as follows:
paul@paul-ubuntu:~/ gunzip -c FreeNAS-i386-embedded-0.69.4276.img | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc
The key here is the name of your CF device. In our case we used a small USB multi-card reader which assigns a unique device name for all the different slots. The CF slot shows up as /dev/sdc. With that piece of information you're ready to blast your image using the command line string above. You can also use the dmesg command to check yourself after inserting the CF card as in:
paul@paul-ubuntu:~/ dmesg | tail -n 24
That will show you the last 24 kernel messages and should contain a few lines that indicate the device name of the card you just attached.
Software Configuration
When the A2000 boots for the first time into FreeNAS you'll be presented with the following menu:
Console setup ------------- 1) Assign interfaces 2) Set LAN IP address 3) Reset WebGUI password 4) Reset to factory defaults 5) Ping host 6) Shell 7) Reboot system 8) Shutdown system
You'll need to configure a few things like the IP address if you want it to be fixed. FreeNAS picks 192.168.1.250 by default, so if that doesn't work for you you'll need to change it. The remainder of the configuration happens from the Web interface.
Connecting to the FreeNAS box from a web browser requires you to enter the IP address you configured as in http://192.168.1.250. This will bring up a login box with a default username of admin and password of freenas. Once you get logged in you'll see a clean looking web page with a menu bar across the top. The next steps you need to accomplish would be to add your disk drives from the Disks > Management option. Next you have to format the drives from the Disks > Format menu.
At this point you have a couple of options. In our case we have two 1.5 TB drives installed that will appear as two distinct drives by default. FreeNAS supports several RAID options and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) to make multiple drives look like a single volume. To create a software RAID you must select Software RAID when you format your disks. Once that's done you have to go back and format the RAID (or JBOD) in the native UFS file system. Next comes creating a mount point for your new storage and, finally, you must enable the services you want to provide such as CIFS or FTP.
Bottom Line
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives can be had for under $125 from several different Internet vendors. Couple that with the $299 base price for the ARTiGO A2000 plus another $50 for memory, and you're looking at around $600 for a full-featured, 3 TB NAS box. If you do a little searching around you'll find that price to be extremely competitive (meaning much cheaper) than anything you could find already packaged in a ready-to-use box.
The VIA ARTiGO A2000 does its job quietly and efficiently. You can barely hear the fan running in a quiet room. Coupling that with the bargain-priced Seagate drives and FreeNAS software makes for a solid and cost effective storage solution. Why look anywhere else?