FreeNAS Mini XL, 8 bay Mini-ITX NAS

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Catching up on email, I saw a Newsletter from iX Systems announcing the FreeNAS Mini XL (the irony).  On the new FreeNAS Mini page it looks just like the FreeNAS mini but taller to accommodate 8-bays.

Available on Amazon starting at $1,500 with no drives.

Here’s the Quick Start Guide and Data Sheet.

The pictures show what appears to be equipped with the Asrock C2750d4i motherboard which has an 8-core Atom / Avoton processor.  With the upcoming FreeNAS 9.10 (based on FreeBSD 10) it should be able to run the bhyve hypervisor as well (at least from CLI, might have to wait until FreeNAS 10 for a bhyve GUI) meaning a nice all-in-one hypervisor with ZFS without the need for VT-d.   This may end up being a great successor to the HP Microserver for those wanting to upgrade with a little more capacity.

The case is the Ablecom CS-T80 so I imagine we’ll start seeing it from Supermicro soon as well.  According to Ablecom it has 8 hotswap bays plus 2 x 2.5″ internal bays and still managed to have room for a slim DVD/Blu-Ray drive.

ablecom_cs_t80 It’s really great to see an 8-bay Mini-ITX NAS case that’s nicer than the existing options out there.  I hope the FreeNAS Mini XL will have an option for a more powerful motherboard even if it means having to use up the PCI-E slot with an HBA–I’m not really a fan of the Marvell SATA controllers on that board, and of course a Xeon-D would be nice.

 

 

6 thoughts on “FreeNAS Mini XL, 8 bay Mini-ITX NAS”

    • I contacted Ablecom when it first came out, they’re not really setup to be a retailer but they were willing to ship just one for a reasonable price. I never did because drives are so big these days… even 4 x 6TB drives is more than enough for me. Now we have 10TB drives (that would provide 20TB in RAID-10 or 30TB RAID-Z/RAID-5) which seems like enough for most home users (which is what this form factor would target) unless you’re a DataHoarder. |:-)

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  4. It look slightly different from CS-T80 what I can find over internet. Actually seem like one, I assume old type, has locable front door fully covering the front of the case, whilst second type, the one you have in the post does not. Any idea whether there is any difference in airflow. I have read that chassis , old type chassis have some overheating problems.

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  5. I cant find the Link anymore. In my opinion is one of the most issues that People try to use 1U passive Boards. This is not a good idea in this case. The flow is not the same as in a 1U Server case.

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