Quiet high-end ZFS NAS home file server, Dec '09 edition

[mentosan]

[Cross-posted at hardforum]

I want to build some really reliable storage for my data, and it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem at the moment that does live checksumming. That rules out DroboPro, so I'm looking to building a quiet ZFS NAS that would start with 6 1TB or larger hard drives. I'd like this system to be very reliable and future-proof, so I'm willing to invest some serious $$$.

Case: I think I've settled on the Antec Twelve Hundred case because it's good at cooling, quiet, and simply has 12 bays that allow elastic mounting. The SilverStone Raven is its counter-candidate, but I find its construction quite odd.

For the PSU, I'm torn between Antec CP-850 and Nexus RX-8500. The Nexus has a very uniform power profile, and I'd rather not have the Antec spin up and down based on load. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often my file server will draw more than 400W under use.

For the hard drives, I've read that WD Black drives are actually WD RE3 with a software setting changed. I'd also like to buy *different* drive types, not just 6 WDs. Maybe 2 WDs, 2 Seagates and 2 other drives. Recommendations?

For the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have no idea, other than the CPU has to be 64-bit and the RAM must be ECC.

Advice please?

Lastly, I'm wondering if I can make this PC into a media server by adding a Blu-ray drive and a good sound card. But I have no idea of the OpenSolaris support for such multimedia usage, or if Windows 7 on VirtualBox would get sufficient hardware access to output HDMI or SPDIFF signals. (Running OpenSolaris virtualized is not an option because of the reliability risk)

Suggestions on that would be highly appreciated as well.

[HFat]

I have never done this but the first thing I'd worry about would be the drives. You say you want to avoid virtualization because of the cache issue but my understanding is that this is an implementation/configuration issue rather than a problem with virtualization per se. And you'll have the same problem if your drives play fast and loose with flushes.
So my question is: do you (or anyone else) know for a fact which drives are safe to use with ZFS? Is it a matter of getting "professional" drives or are there known-good cheap drives?

[cordis]

I tried setting up an OpenSolaris ZFS server once, it's not a trivial thing to do. My system was a lot lower powered, Atom 330 in the 4 bay chenbro case, but it didn't seem too pokey at the command line. I got the disks up and running reasonably easy, but I never did get samba working quite right. OpenSolaris isn't really up to the ease of use level that other OSes like Ubuntu are at, so it may take some unix hacking to get things going the way you like them.
I really doubt you'll be able to get a blu-ray HTPC going, linux support for blu-ray is spotty at best, I think the only solutions I've seen to cracking blu-ray encryption involve ripping the disk and decoding on the hard drive, so it's not exactly plug and play, and getting it going on OpenSolaris instead of linux is yet another hurdle there. I'm not sure if any standard linux htpc stuff will work on OpenSolaris. Running windows in virtual mode might work, but I do have blu-ray working on my htpc, and getting it going was no easy feat, the blu-ray playing software usually has some kind of test software to tell you if you can play blu-rays on your system, and the big problems are the graphics card security issues. I have two screens hooked up to my htpc, but I have to disable one of them to play blu-rays, and I have no idea how a virtual windows system will find the security of an HDMI port. All in all, I'm not liking your chances with an OpenSolaris HTPC. Good luck, though.