Using Intel ATOM as OpenSolaris NAS engine

I  recently started searching for a power- and price-efficient engine for modest-sized NAS, running OpenSolaris (Nexenta) of course. The idea to go to Intel ATOM first comes from their high power efficiency (1-13W TDP). To really benefit from it, do not only take into account the power used by the CPU, but also the whole motherboard (you know, chipset and GPU [Graphic Processing Unit]). ATOM is supposed to dissipate so little heat that a fan might not be necessary, so most motherboards for ATOM ship with passive/fanless cooling.

Installing Squid on ZFS

The recommended filesystem for Squid on OpenSolaris is ZFS: http://wiki.squid-cache.org/BestOsForSquid It is also recommended to disable the atime property on the filesystem holding the cache, and you may want to avoid using any type of RAID. To achieve this on Nexenta (or OpenSolaris, whatever), first create the ZFS filesystem: # zfs create -o atime=off -o mountpoint=/var/spool/squid3 syspool/squidcache Then install Squid (here for version 3.x, as you might have noticed from the com