The case finally arrived for the file server, which me get it up and running in a test capacity. Still waiting on the hard drives, but hopefully soon! 4x 3TB Toshibas are on their way as of today. The case ordered was a Lian Li PC-A04B, mATX case with loads of drive bays, 3 included 120mm fans, and overall a really good build quality. I had everything installed the night it arrived, along with a 320GB hard drive to test out ZFS and Napp-It.
As you can see in the above picture, the test system is a bit messy. Unfortunately it's going to be a bit difficult to make it look pretty, as the 24 pin power is placed in a really bad spot. It doesn't really interfere with anything, but it does make hiding that one cable a bit tough. I removed the USB/eSATA/audio panel from the top, as the cables were super long, and I wasn't going to be using those features anyway. Once the new drives arrive, I'll be swapping the hard drive cages around and tidying the cables. Hopefully I'll have some new pictures to show off, as I'm really proud of this little machine. Also, after getting it reset back to defaults, IPMI is amazing. I only have 2 network cables and a power cable attached, but I don't even need to touch the physical machine for anything. Power up/down, KVM, etc... All handled by the IPMI chip. Anyway, final initial specs below!
Intel Core i3 2120T
SuperMicro X9SCL+-F
4GB Kingston ECC DDR3
Lian Li PC-A04B
Corsair CX430 430w PSU
4x Toshiba DT01ABA300 3TB drives in RAID10 equivalent (Striped mirrors, 6TB usable)
I'm considering adding a 40GB Intel SSD as a ZIL, but I'm not sure how the read/write performance would be with it. The main purpose of this will be as a file server, even though the ESXI box will have a direct link to it, and will probably use some of the storage space for low I/O virtual machines. Some are going to find it a little weird that I'm using striped mirrors for a basic file server instead of RAIDZ or RAIDZ2, but I have my reasons. First off, it makes adding drives slightly cheaper. Although it's less storage space, I only have to purchase 2 drives to increase capacity instead of 3. If I were to fill the server to capacity (3 3.5" drives in the 5.25" bays), it would limit me to 15TB of usable space, which is a considerable chunk, and I'm happy with that. The other reason is raw performance. RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 have limited random IO vs a mirror. This will be great if I do decide to host some more intensive virtual machines on it, or stream multiple things from it.