Well, I ordered hardware for my new lab Wednesday night. Several packages should be arriving today, but it will be Wednesday next week til the rest of the packages have arrived and I have time to put everything together.
I ordered everything from Newegg:
- iStarUSA D-300-PFS
- ASUS P7F-X
- Intel Xeon 3440
- Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333
- Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D
- 3x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
- Netgear GS724T-300NAS Gigabit Smart Switch
The plan is to migrate everything on the current ESXi host to the tiny storage server. (This is mostly complete already as I was expecting to have to do a reinstall before.) The 3x drives will then be placed in the old host, loaded with FreeNAS 8, and a RAIDZ pool configured. I’m hoping to be able to run some tests, see how 4GB of RAM, no L2ARC or separate ZIL maybe be impacting performance. SSDs are still a bit too expensive for L2ARC or ZIL. Another 4GB of RAM should be doable however.
The server should go together pretty easily. I still need to purchase some high speed USB drives to act as OS drives for these systems. The cheap HP thumb drives I have now just don’t cut it.
The switch will be a bit of an adventure. I expect I’ll be rebuilding my lab several times over the coming months, one because I expect to be moving in that time, but also as I figure out better ways to set things up, gain a better understanding, etc.
