jmtd → hardware → Φόβος
Φόβος (phobos) is the name of my NAS, backup and home server. It's the successor to a Mac mini G4 and the (ultimately abandoned) Thecus n2100. It's now on its second mainboard, notes about the first one are at J1900N-D3V.
It's a small (ish) size, passively-cooled PC that I leave on 24/7 and performs various duties for me, most importantly being a large archive storage space and a separate backup space.
Hardware
- Coolermaster Elite 110 case passively cooled
- ASRock J4105-ITX Mini-ITX mainboard with a passively-cooled Celeron SoC
- 2x 4T WD Red drives (one for archive, one for backup)
- 8G RAM (2x4 for dual channel)
- custom ATX PSU blanking plate with DC-DC cut-out from Kustom PCs
- Simtec Entropy Key
- Blinkstick Nano for notifications (see below)
Power consumption
Back-of-the-envelope,
- SoC: 10W (Intel TDP), some people experiencing draw of about 14W idle with one SSD connected
I plan to do some power draw measurements in the near future.
Some notes
The Coolermaster case is high-quality. It's much bigger than I'd like, but is the smallest case I could find at the time. It's about the same size as a HP Microserver (which I was continually recommended when I re-specced this machine) and there's at least growing room.
Front/side USB port provblems
The front (side) USB ports are weird. They are mounted upside down in the case. With two different mainboards I've had a succession of problems using them for removable storage.
Software
Debian GNU/Linux for the operating system. I backup via rdiff-backup.
I don't use RAID (which is not backup).
Remote decryption
I use full-disk encryption which necessitates supplying a passphrase when the
machine is booted. Since this is a headless box, some additional work is needed
to permit supplying this passphrase over the network. Luckily most of the work
is done already by installing the dropbear
Debian package and reconfiguring
keys and authorized_keys files in /etc/initramfs-tools
afterwards. This means
I can SSH into the pre-boot environment. From there, I just need to run
cryptroot-unlock
and supply the decryption passphrase.
Notifications
I wanted to add a means of notifying me of events on the machine. I bought a
Blinkstick Nano, a tiny USB stick with an LED on each
side. I've hooked calls to change the light colour into the success/failure paths
for the systemd
jobs that drive my backups. Further details here:
1,
2,
3.
The light defaults to off. When an interactive job is in progress, it turns on and blue. When the job completes, the light changes to either green or red depending on success or failure. Green means I am safe to remove the drive, in the case of external drives.
When a non-interactive, scheduled job fails, the light turns red. I usually notice this next morning.
Comments
Both disks are currently at around 35°C. I think this is pretty constant, but it might depend on the season of the year. I've just put in place an additional monitoring step so I can track it better going forward.
Can you post SMART data of these HDDs?
I'm trying to decide currently whether to go for this Cooler Master case or for Chieftec IX-01B/IX-03B. The latter is much smaller (although the CM isn't big either and shouldn't be a problem to move around) and fit for passive cooling, but hold only one HDD, so max 8-10TB right now for me for the whole unit, that may very well be enough for me up to the point where SSDs are cheap enough to use them for this purpose. Putting fans in that Chieftec is not great, because it can hold only 50mm ones and these seem to be louder.
Sure: smartctl sda.txt and smartctl sdb.txt. A is archive, B is backup.
You may also be interested in wd drive head parking and update which explain one of the high attributes for SDB.